Palimpsest-wise soil drawings: Territorial inscriptions of time

This article presents soil conceptual frameworks to understand soils as historical living archives, such as the understanding of soil palimpsest memory and the way in which local material histories expand over the territory. Soil memory concepts have been widely explored and instrumentalized to understand Earth’s history and much more extensively in archaeological records, where relationships between environmental conditions and human activities are mutually shaped, so environmental changes can be recorded in soil memory over time. For this article, drawing serves to bring attention to the details of soil memory that are visible in the unearthed materials. Moreover, drawing articulates soil detailing across scales, starting with the microscopical drawings illustrating the forensic attention required to delineate features associated with environmental dynamics. The drawings presented in this work integrate the microscopic detailing, the soil pits and the territorial scale photographs, slicing and layering the grounds to expose the material manifestations of the presented soil concepts. The drawings presented in this work elaborate on the palimpsest nature of soil memory, meaning that when looking at a soil at the present, it is possible to see the factors of its formation from the present, the recent past and the remote past. By drawing different processes recorded in soil formation, historical drawings can provide insights into processes and moments in time that can hint at alternatives worth proposing and drawing for design and planning purposes. The soil conceptual frameworks are used to bridge concepts that can provoke material and metaphorical fresh lenses to represent soils as living archives of the processes of landscape design. The drawings presented were developed in the Just Transition research project and explore how soil knowledges provoke soil-related visual narratives relevant for the design and planning fields through their concepts, methods and metaphors.