Study on the Evolution Mechanism of Cultural Landscapes Based on the Analysis of Historical Events—A Case Study of Gubeikou, Beijing

The cultural landscape of Gubeikou, with distinct historical stratification and event-relatedness, bears unique value. Against the backdrop of increasingly prominent themes of cultural heritage development and transformation, research on Gubeikou’s cultural landscapes remains fragmented and lacking in depth. This research explores its evolution mechanism via historical events to fill gaps. This study takes Gubeikou Town as the research object, applies the text analysis method to sort and categorize 302 historical events, summarizes 12 event types, identifies 19 landscape elements, and constructs a data matrix based on co-occurrence frequencies. It performs clustering analysis on these using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC), while integrating historical and geographical data. Findings: (1) The landscape evolution of Gubeikou can be divided into four main stages: the military embryonic period, the functional expansion period, the system maturity period, and the multi-element integration period. (2) The dynamic evolutionary trajectory of the correlation between its landscapes and events shows that the core factors affecting the evolution of cultural landscapes in each period not only maintain the dominance of military elements throughout the evolutionary process but also integrate diverse elements like economy, culture, and folk customs with social development, presenting the characteristics of composite evolution. (3) The landscape evolution is driven by the “primary–secondary synergy” dynamic structure composed of four types of activities: military–political, transportation, production–trade, and construction. It is the product of the coupling effect of political goals, social operation, and geographical conditions. This study provides a basis for the sustainable protection and utilization of Gubeikou, and also offers a reference for other regions.