ABSTRACT Katsushika Hokusai's Eight Views of Ryūkyū displays a sophisticated blending of Chinese artistic motifs with the stylistic nuances of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Produced at the height of Hokusai’s career, the series draws inspiration from the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang while portraying Ryukyu’s landscapes—despite Hokusai never visiting the islands. This study examines Hokusai’s reinterpretation of Chinese themes, his insertion of distinctly Japanese elements, and the ways these choices reflect cultural and political dynamics between Japan, Ryūkyū and China. The paper highlights the symbolic role of these prints in negotiating regional identities and narratives, situating them as a pivotal contribution to the ukiyo-e tradition.

ABSTRACT The East Fen of Lincolnshire was the most northerly of the virtually continuous stretches of freshwater wetland that reached almost to Cambridge in the south. It differed from the other fenlands in not being drained until the nineteenth century. It occupied a basin which had been flooded in late Roman times but thereafter colonised by a series of ecosystems, some of which were used as resources. This paper—and its on-line Supplementary Material—takes the period between about AD 700 and the advent of pumped drainage in the late seventeenth century, and for that interval it aims to chronicle the interactions between use by bordering communities and the biophysical components of water, plants and animals. The source materials are mostly printed, with the addition of a few informative documents, and the focus is on the landscape itself. To help readers unfamiliar with this area, the central paper has a mostly chronological sequence and is accompanied by eight Supplementary Material sections which enlarge upon particular aspects of the narrative. These include a Table which summarises the whole history of this Fen, and directions for a Google Earth-based transect across the landscape as shown in Street View.

ABSTRACT Statistical approaches and spatial modelling remain under-used in studies of the English rural landscape; patterns and associations in the historical environment have instead usually been treated in a subjective and impressionistic, rather than an objective and analytical, manner. In this paper we employ mathematical modelling to explore the relationship of ancient woodland to soil types and parish boundaries in eastern England. We argue that such approaches can serve to highlight relationships and associations that are not immediately apparent, as well as test the significance of those that have already been proposed, and that they should be more widely adopted in landscape history.

ABSTRACT The interlaced terrain of rivers, canals and living and working habits associated with the water environment have formed the river culture of the people of the Southwest region of Vietnam. In creating their scenic narratives, many cinematic works use the element of water as an artistic code to reflect lives and convey human messages. This article examines from the perspective of landscape criticism three films set at different periods of Vietnam’s recent history—Cánh đồng hoang (The Abandoned Field, directed by Hong Sen, 1979), Mùa len trâu (The Buffalo Boy, directed by Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh, 2004) and Cánh đồng bất tận (The Floating Lives, directed by Nguyen Phan Quang Binh, 2010). These three case studies enable an analysis of the water element in the artistic representation of the landscape of Southwestern Vietnam to see the role of this element in art, and its influence on cinematic language, not only in the natural context but also in terms of culture and history. Pointing out both the similarities and distinctiveness of each film shows how they each exploits the same landscape element to establish the artistic value of cinema.

ABSTRACT Towards the end of the first millennium, a fundamental change in the fabric of Western European elite society occurred as families began to promote themselves not on the basis of kin-groups but of their personal wealth. Key to self-aggrandisement was the ownership of local power centres, into which aristocrats poured investment. In England, few of these magnate cores have been investigated archaeologically, and understanding relies on a small corpus of well-excavated sites. Eager to shift this dependence on excavated evidence, research at Laughton en le Morthen, South Yorkshire used a range of methods to reveal the origins of an aristocratic centre, and its transformation in the wake of the Norman Conquest. This included construction of a motte and bailey castle that was perhaps never used for military purposes, but was instead curated as a folly-type feature expressive of new lordly power. The results from Laughton not only allow the evolution of the site and its landscape to be mapped, but also shows the value of adopting diverse archaeological research methodologies for understanding medieval magnate cores.

ABSTRACT Abbey Wood today is a beautiful, if ill-kept, mixed deciduous woodland a few hundred metres to the south of the former Cistercian monastery of Strata Florida in the Upper Teifi Valley in central Ceredigion, Wales. It consists of a number of different elements of land use and ecology, largely self-regenerated wood and scrub, some older tree specimens and patches of open rough pasture. There are ecological traces of historic management such as pollards and coppice boles, as well as extensive areas of archaeological earthworks on the woodland floor. These appear to demonstrate that the wood, as its name suggests, was originally planted onto open agricultural land perhaps as early as the twelfth century at the time of the Abbey’s foundation. The present extent is approximately 80 hectares (c.200 acres), but early estate maps show that 250 years ago it was larger and much more coherent as a managed wood. Some conifers were planted by the Forestry Commission in the mid-twentieth century. This article will argue that the historic wood was the main source of timber for the Abbey and that this re-founded institution, as part of its re-shaping of a pre-existing traditional landscape sacrificed good arable land for the purpose.

"Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Topographical Art in North-West Italy, 1800-1920." Landscapes, 22(2), pp. 191–192