A new book with a significant contributions from Petr Pokorný and Michaela Ptáková from the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Paleoecology at the Faculty of Science, Hinterland. Archeology of the North Bohemian Sandstone Landscapes has now been published by the Prague-based publishing house Kodudek. The title, appealing format, and interesting content introduce both experts and non-expert readers to the exceptionally interesting topic of prehistoric, medieval, and contemporary settlements in the lesser-known landscapes of the northern edges of our country.
Today's archaeology is an integral science of everything acient that has been swept away by time and escaped the memory of living people and written sources. A necessary consequence of its development is the immense diversity and a complexity of research methods. The most modern methods of chemistry, physics, geology, and biology are often used. The team of authors, which has been intensively studying sandstone landscapes for about a quarter of a century, is truly interdisciplinary. The sandstones of northern Bohemia have proven to be exceptionally rich in traces of both the distant and recent past. They are characterized by an abundance of various natural archives that bear these traces. Their research gradually revealed a picture of the unique development of sandstone landscapes, which, although they lay on the edge of the main settlement enclaves for millennia, were at the same time their essential, "nourishing" hinterland.
For most of the time under review, these landscapes were forested and difficult to traverse. Despite their natural-cultural hybridity, nature always had the upper hand, so to speak. The poor soil and rugged terrain allowed for only limited agricultural activity, if any. But never, or at least most of the time, was it completely wild. People passed through the rock labyrinths, lived there permanently or temporarily, hunted there, gathered forest fruits, obtained wood, and grazed domestic animals. They hid there from adversity and other people. It is a surprisingly colorful and, for our time, perhaps even instructive history.
