ADVANCED GRANT UNITA - Water Heritage, a Paradigm for Sustainability : a Close Link between Humans, Environment and Climate in Mountainous Areas

Unita - Hub Cultural Heritage

sept. 2026- sept. 2027

Summary

In mountainous areas, due to great slopes and thin soil layers, water management has always played a key role in the development of agriculture, soil management and landscape evolution, thus standing at the intersection of geomorphology, human effort and climate. This structural relationship between humans and the environment lead to complex and coevolutive water management systems, most of them being gravity driven. Gravity provided both the energy to move the water and its attitude to be lost in streams and channels quickly flowing downstream. Human mastering of water management was therefore a gradual acquisition of the ability to properly channel its course. This assumption contains an implicit and strong commitment for the landscape resiliency, because no more water than that available thanks to the hydrologic cycle, locally or in the surroundings, could be used. The result is a complex cultural landscape where ancestral views on the hydrological cycle and agricultural practices cooperated with multifunctional water technologies, involving the simplest high mountain channels and the
complex Spanish qanats or the precise tree–by–tree irrigation of lake Garda lemon houses. What is the future of these archaic systems? Is their importance merely paradigmatic or might , they provide valuable insights on future water management in mountainous regions? To unveil the multidimensional benefit of the ecosystem services of the water heritage, it is necessary a strong interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities and technical sciences, to define a methodology of investigation able to let cross exchanges and pollination between different epistemologies. This step was taken during the experience of a UNITA Starting Grant, that allowed us to develop a collaborative research group of archaeologists, anthropologists, environmental and law historians, and hydrologists, to define – based on case studies in the French and ;Spanish Pyrenees, in Savoie and around the lake Garda (Italy) – an interdisciplinary methodology to study how the dimensions of the water heritage interacted. With this proposal of a UNITA Advanced Grant we aim at applying the methodology on the selected case studies, testing its effectiveness, analyzing its potentialities and disseminating it through publications and to MSc and PhD students, and young researchers, of different cultural background, to stimulate an effective cultural approach to the complexity of the water heritage.

Keywords

water heritage, ancestral irrigation, gravity irrigation, commons, mountains

Partners

Institution leader : UPPA ( porteur : Mathilde Lamothe mathilde.lamothe @ univ-pau.f )

UNITA partners : 4 (Università degli Studi di Brescia, Université Savoie-Mont-Blanc, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour)

Geminae Partner : 1 (Université de Québec à Trois-Rivière)

Socio-economic partners : 15 (CIRDOC-Institut occitan de cultura, Parc National des Pyrénées, Department of Ethnological and Intangible Heritage of the Government of Navarra, MEMOLab, Biocultural Heritage Laboratory, Assemblée du Pays de Tarentaise Vanoise (APTV), Communauté de Communes de Haute Tarentaise (CCHT), Parc National de la Vanoise (PNV), Fondation pour l’Action Culturelle en Montagne (FACIM), Conseil d’Architecture, d’Urbanisme et de l’Environnement
de la Savoie (CAUE 73, CAUE 74) )