Tales of transformation: (re)injecting Latvia’s coastlands with temporality

ABSTRACT

This article explores the potential for a broader, more integrated treatment of the long-term development of Latvia’s coastal landscape, seeking avenues for conveying its dynamism. Various transformational processes are considered, with a particular focus on dune migration – formerly a major issue in Latvia but nowadays essentially resolved and forgotten. Relief features of the sandy, forested areas, as well as old pine trees, serve as cues to temporality in the present terrain, while historical and folkloric sources provide insights into past perceptions of the landscape and the experiences and imaginings of landscape change.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape perception
• coast
• dunes
• forest
• archeology
• history
• folklore

Acknowledgments

The author is most grateful to dendrochronologist Māris Zunde for making available his unpublished data on the Pūsēnkalns pines and his collection of digitized press articles, to archaeologist Egita Lūsēna for the photograph from her excavation at Piedāgi, and to the anonymous reviewers for a great many insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Referring to the erstwhile duchy that encompassed the southwestern regions of present-day Latvia (Figure 1).

2. The Courland mile was a distance measure comparable to the Scandinavian mile (approx. 10–11 km) – much longer than the present-day statute mile. Its precise length is not known (Zemzaris 1981); however, I can verify independently that Balanda lies 11 km from the present-day coast.

3. Quotations are the author’s own translations.

4. The Baltic Ice Lake stage, ca. 14000–9700 BCE, when the present Baltic Sea basin was occupied by an immense ice-dammed lake (Rosentau et al. 2017).

5. The Soviet occupation period of 1945–1991 brought rapid and far-reaching ecological, land-use, and social changes in Latvia’s coastal belt (Nitavska and Zigmunde 2013), but these are not the focus of the present article, which instead offers a longue durée perspective.

6. The soil conditions in the area behind the advancing dune are not described but were evidently suitable only for potatoes, the hardiest subsistence crop, which would likely have been fertilized with seaweed. There is an 1834 map of part of the Nīca estate that appears to show the described situation (Stūre 2009, Figure 5).

7. As described in an e-mail to the author from Māris Zunde (Dendrochronological Laboratory, Institute of Latvian History, University of Latvia) on 30 November 2021, he obtained core samples from the trunks of 10 living pines on Pūsēnkalns in 2020. The cores of the two oldest trees, growing on the dune summit, had 169 and 171 rings. Taking into account that the cores did not quite reach the center of the trunk, so that the very first growth rings are missing, and that some more years need to be added to take into account the time before the trees reached the height at which they were sampled, these two pines are estimated to have a true age of ca. 180 years, i.e. they began growing ca. 1840.

8. Latvia’s 2013–2019 national program of airborne laser scanning, which provided high-quality relief data for the whole country (Latvijas Ģeotelpiskās informācijas aģentūra n.d..).

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article has been funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project “People in a dynamic landscape: tracing the biography of Latvia’s sandy coastal belt” (lzp-2018/1-0171).

Notes on contributors

Valdis Bērziņš

Valdis Bērziņš is a senior researcher at the Institute of Latvian History, University of Latvia. He received a PhD in Archeology from Oulu University in 2009. His research focuses mainly on Stone Age archeology, especially settlement subsistence and ancient technologies in the coastal belt of Latvia. He also has a special interest in archeological wood and charcoal, and has led major interdisciplinary projects, collaborating extensively with historians and paleolandscape and environmental specialists.