Commemorative Landscapes across Florida

Landscape Character Assessment of Historical Memory: 

Commemorative Landscapes across Florida

Landscape Character Assessment of Historical Memory project is a scholarly assessment by co-directed by a historian and two archaeologists at New College of Florida of the many landmarks across the state as a resource for the citizens of the state to understand the decisions over preservation made over the centuries. Support for this Fall 2025 pilot project was provided by a Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The inventory is designed to highlight the living history of Florida for the public.

A robust, dynamic history is found across Florida but few of its residents and visitors are aware of the breadth and depth of the history even though the past is marked on the landscape. The State of Florida has heritage trails for its Native American, Cuban French, Jewish, African American, and other specialized history. Florida Humanities provides walking tours of several locations across the state. Several digital archives include historical maps of Florida. There are programs through the state and through local governments that erect historical markers, with databases. Tremendous care is given to the markers and monuments, focused on the commemoration. Landscape Character Assessment of Historical Memory creates an inventory for identifying the combination of elements and features surrounding monuments, memorials, markers, public art, statues and other landmarks dedicated to the Florida past.

Bibliography for Landscape Character Assessment of Historical Memory Uzi Baram

Florida History and Archaeology

Florida Under Five Flags. Rembert W. Patrick 1945

Florida: A Short History. Michael Gannon, Michael 1993

Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Jerald T. Milanich 1994

Studies of Landscapes

Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. Bruno David, Julian Thomas, editors, 2008

The Routledge Companion to Landscapes Studies. Peter Howard, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha, editors, 2013

Ideas of Landscape. Matthew Johnson 2007

Routledge Handbook of Landscape Character Assessment: Current Approaches to Characterisation and Assessment. Graham Fairclough, Ingrid Herlin, and Carys Sweanwick, editors 2018

Landscape Character Assessment

What is Landscape Character Assessment? https://www.nature.scot/professional-advice/landscape/landscape-character-assessment/what-landscape-character-assessment

Landscape Character Assessment. Technical Information Note 08/2015 https://www.landscapeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Landscape-Character-Assessment-TIN-08_15-20160216.pdf

Goal of the pilot project, Fall 2025: LCA for several monuments and memorials on the Florida central Gulf coast. Documentation will follow a set of protocols on this form (and see below); the inventory will allow access to the visual inspections 

Why the Inventory of Landscape Character Assessment of memorials and monuments? LCA is a description of how the landscape is perceived and experienced by people, a reflection of people’s practices and activities. Even more than other regions of the country, the landscapes of Florida are rapidly changing with the continuing demographic growth, increase in infrastructure, and coastal zone changes with rising sea levels. Landscape Character Assessment identifies and describes variation in the character of the landscape, to recognize what makes a landscape, in this case around a monument, distinct from one another; the inventory documents what people are seeing today, for future researchers and heritage managers to have comparisons and to make better decisions over preservation and conservation of monuments on our landscape.

The pilot program involves the three co-directors and New College of Florida undergraduates under their supervision. The team has invited members of Time Sifters Archaeology Society, an organization committed to archaeological ethics, to join the survey; if you are, or become, a Time Sifters member (see https://www.timesifters.org/ to join), please contact Baram@ncf.edu to contribute to the project