The origins of cultural landscape theory in the Anglo-American tradition

The concept of cultural landscape appeared in the first quarter of the 20th century, is associated with the attempt of the American geographer С. Sauer to give the first detailed description of this type of cultural heritage. Based on the analysis of English and American historiography, the authors of the article identify the main approaches to the study of cultural landscapes, determine the priority directions of landscape studies formed during the 20th century in the English-speaking world. One of them is connected with the understanding of the landscape as a piece of land, modified by a certain cultural community of people, the second one is associated with the new humanistic geography, its interest in place and space, expressed in the aesthetic, symbolic, semantic, phenomenological, hermeneutic approaches to the analysis of the cultural landscape. The authors attempt not only to show C. Sauer's role in the foundation and development of modern cultural geography, as well as the founder of the School of Humanitarian Geographers (School of Cultural Geography) of the University of California in Berkeley (USA), but also to identify his contribution to the development of cultural landscape theory.