Preliminary Programme

Research into the settlement history of this area has been undertaken since the early nineteen eighties within the compass of the interdisciplinary Strouza Region Project and the Aetolian Studies Project. The research originally concentrated on the palaiokastro near the almost ghost village of Strouza, which is presumed to be the first polis of Eastern Aetolia in classical antiquity: Aigition. Over the years the project developed into a longitudinal survey of human settlement, seeking to explain how human habitation interacted with the natural environment. The application of geographical models with respect to settlement location, resource utilization and communication play an important role in the project.
In this paper I intend to look at the shifts in location of settlements in Aetolia from prehistory up to the present. The aim is to specify the ways in which settlements changed site in response to changing conditions or changing preferences of location. I hope to show in which ways settlements ‘wandered about’ within their surrounding exploitation areas through time.
The structure of this paper is as follows: first I will look at how we can use location theory and geographical notions about rural settlements, referring in particular to the Greek case. I will then discuss how we operationalized and quantified our approach to the problem. I will present a geographic analysis of the research region based on modern maps and literary sources. After this an attempt is made to link data on settlements from prehistory to the modern period to the landscape data, studying the changing relationships between settlements and location factors through time. The paper is concluded by ideas about the further refinement and applicability of the method used here. (Show less)

At the Institute of European History in Mainz - in
conjunction with the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz
- a historical GIS on Germany in the 19th century is being
built up. It contains, among other things, a strong plank on
historical statistics. The paper will focus on the
selection, collection, processing, and dissimination of
these statistical data, which will be available to the
general public via Internet and - for the first time - will
be directly linked to spatial data contained in the
geodatabase of the GIS. As envisioned, the user will be able
to map this data, e.g., create a map on the population
density of Germany for any given year between 1820 and 1914
on the fly. (Show less)

This paper is part of an on-going series of papers that I have undertaken on the electoral geography of East Friesland, which will result in a monograph-length electronic publication, and also fits within my broader research on German agrarianism. At past conferences of the ESSHA, the American SSHA and the Association for History and Computing, I have presented a series of papers examining the sources of agrarian political activity in the Prussian Regierungbezirke of Stade and Aurich (Ostfriesland).
These papers have examined variables such as tax rates, indebtedness, crop growing and livestock-raising patterns, population density, confessional diversity, landscape type, village characteristics, market structure, and access to rail lines. This research has quantified and reinforced the contemporary impression that agrarianism found it greatest resonance in Marsch districts - extremely fertile areas reclaimed from the North Sea.

There were, however, noticeable differences between the two Regierungsbezirke. Were these differences the result of local peculiarities, or different historical trajectories (the two areas had distinctly different political and administrative histories)? To test this hypothesis, in this paper I will add the 1st and 2nd Reichstag constituencies of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg into my set of variables. Both were predominantly Marsch areas, but neither sustained a vibrant agrarian movement. Only in some villages in the 2nd constituency were the agrarians able to sustain a political presence. Using historical GIS and unpublished village election results, this paper will focus upon the Reichstag elections of 1893, 1898, and 1903. The result will be a better understanding of German agrarianism at the fin-de-siécle as it existed along the North Sea coast. (Show less)