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Mythical landscape as a source about organizing the space Modern society is characterized by a number of hyper-specializations, while the people from the past treated the world and themselves in a holistic way. The advantage of their holistic life was in the maintenance of the ability of a sustainable developmnet. Right in this point the modern society failed, that is why we are confronted with the catastrophic changes in our living space. The project will research, what were the wisdoms of our forefathers and what can we learn from them for the present-day use. The aim of the project is to research some old principles of organising the space in the context of the ideology and society of that time, to demonstrate their topographic materialization and to develop new analytic methods. The work is explicitly interdisciplinary, because it is constructed on two sorts of sources; on the oral tradition, researched by ethnology and on the topographic situations, researched by archaeology. The ideal point of departure for the former "urbanistic" solutions in the pre-modern societies was the so-called mythical landscape. We could understand the latter as the space ideograms, which materialized the holistic comprehension of the world of that time.
The researches so far indicate that in the areas of Quarnero and Dalmatia exist some good preserved structures of the ancient mythic landscape. Connected to them is oral tradition, which somewhere is still alive. Among them there is a phenomenon of "mirila", the cemetery of the souls, which are preserved on the south Velebit. The expected results are manifold. On the methodological level we expect a development of the method of ethno-archaeological researches. New interpretations of the old rules of organizing the space will come out, which can be put together in a space history of long periods. This enables the observation of the sample consequences of human interventions in the space and by that deepens our knowledge about the sustainable management of the space.
A publication Mirila. Kulturni fenomen / MIRILA. A Cultural Phenomenon concluded the project. Project coordinator Researchers from the Institute of archeaology Duration Project number |
