A dry stone wall is built using natural stones – usually found or mined locally – without the use of any kind of binding material such as mortar. They are amongst the simplest forms of construction and have been built for millennia in virtually all parts of the world where stones are readily available (Harfouche 2017). Working with gravity and friction, wallers place each stone so that it presses down on stones below and prevents neighbouring ones from moving. The work of a waller creates structures that both have a degree of flexibility (stones are not bound to each other) and, if made with care, can be exceptionally durable, potentially lasting centuries.
The ‘Art of dry stone walling, knowledge and techniques’ was inscribed in 2018 on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Acovitsióti-Hameau 2020). This was a multi-country submission (increasingly encouraged by UNESCO; see Bortolotto 2020) on the part of eight European states: Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland. In the text of the decision, climate change and environmental crises might not be explicitly mentioned but are implicit in the recognition of dry stone walling practices in addressing such ecological concerns as ‘landslides, floods, avalanches, combating erosion and desertification of the land’, which tend to be worsening together with the changing climate, and ‘enhancing biodiversity and creating adequate microclimatic conditions for agriculture’, thus combatting the negative effects of environmental degradation caused in part by the climate crisis.
This article presents a reflection on the adaptability of an age-old practice to new ecological concerns. It is based on my ongoing ethnographic investigation of practices, and learning practices, of dry stone walling in Switzerland; my comments will mostly concern Switzerland, as well as the interest of building practices in promoting biodiversity. To fulfil its obligations towards UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Federal Office of Culture of Switzerland created a list of ‘living traditions’; ‘Dry stone walling’ is included in the list.
In Switzerland as elsewhere, dry stone walling has given way to alternative techniques addressing the same functions: retaining walls can now be built with concrete, and the movements of cattle can effectively be controlled with electric fencing. These alternatives have lower labour costs and are faster to deploy. Concrete structures are perceived (arguably wrongly) to be more solid and durable, and fencing is more adapted to contemporary intensive agricultural practices. At least in Switzerland, initiatives for revitalising and maintaining the practice of dry stone walling in the face of more cost- and time-efficient practices have been motivated by the desire to preserve cultural landscapes (in particular the typical alpine pastoral landscape), and to promote biodiversity. Indeed, dry stone walls provide rich habitats for a diversity of plants, animals and insects.
In exploring how an intangible heritage practice becomes reoriented towards ecological concerns, I highlight how the communities of practice that develop around dry stone walling are expanding, as the environmental knowledge of scientists articulates with the knowledge of wallers, and how learning opportunities bring ecological awareness to the practice. The conclusion reflects on the flexibility of the craft and wallers’ knowledge, which make the practice of dry stone walling able to adapt to address pressing issues of concern in the Anthropocene.
Art, Techniques and Knowledge
At its core, the practice of dry stone walling relies on the two principles of gravity and friction to ensure that stones remain in place and work together to form a solid structure without the use of mortar. From these two principles, the craft follows simple ground rules that a newcomer learns to respect – such as placing one stone on two, making sure each stone touches its neighbours and properly filling-in cavities. But these deceptively simple rules hide complexities, which are derived notably by the diversity of locally sourced stone shapes, qualities and availability that wallers need to work with. As one waller explained, even after decades of work he would still come across a part of the wall that will present a new challenge. Stones can be unpredictable; a ‘perfect’ stone identified by a waller might turn out to be more fragile than imagined and shatters as it is worked on. Efficient work is valued, as one waller told me of his mentor, an Italian immigrant: ‘We are not building churches’; in other words, wallers are driven not by aesthetics and should not sweat the details. Wallers might contrast the craft with woodworking, where precision is key – in walling, it is important to do ‘good’ work, defined as effort that results in structures that will stand the test of time but that do not necessarily have to be neatly built.
Anthropologist Trevor Marchand (2016) suggests that at the core of craft practices lie issues of problem-solving that are embodied, situated and often collaborative. Every stone placed in a dry stone wall as it is being built is the solution to a small, local problem: What stone will at best hold together the ones it lies upon through gravity? How will it effectively brace against the ones around it through friction? The thinking process that wallers go through, from identifying a stone, carving it (often minimally) and ensuring that it is well placed, involves a keen sense of vision, what anthropologist Christina Grasseni (2004) identifies as skilled vision, which is developed in practice and at least to some extent by working with others – be they instructors or fellow wallers – asking for advice, pointing out another's problematic work, working collaboratively on a problematic aspect of the wall and evaluating the end result together.
Dry stone walling is a practice that is thoroughly tied to the local. A waller needs to work with available stones, or those mined locally. In the past, this rule was derived from practicality and necessity; today, even though stones can easily and cheaply be imported from around the world, building with local stones is a value promoted by the Swiss Federation of Dry Stone Masons and a requirement for receiving subsidies for building on public land. As a waller explained, the stones dictate what can be done to them – whether they can be easily carved – as well as how and where (in the foundations, body of the wall, capping or ‘crown’) they can be used. The embodied knowledge of wallers is as a consequence tied to a place; although many will travel around the country to work on different projects, they have to adapt their practice to suit the stones they find in each setting. This can involve radically different ways of working; limestone found in different parts of the Jura mountain range (Figure 1), for instance, might be easily carved in one locality and be too brittle to be carved in another. Wallers have to learn to adapt the strength of their blows, or privilege finding the right stone that can fit in the wall virtually untouched.
Newly built dry stone wall in the Jura mountain range of Switzerland
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 33, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2024.330108
Beyond knowledge of stones and how to work with them, wallers need to know how the terrain and weather might impact the walls they are building. They also need to take into account potential damage caused by cattle; as cows enjoy rubbing against the walls, wallers building a pasture wall needs to ensure that the crown of the wall is particularly stable, and they need to select particularly heavy stones to create it. It can then be important for wallers to elicit knowledge from locals and farmers to anticipate potential issues. Wallers are also expected to know about and follow local styles and for instance build the crown of the wall using stones vertically, horizontally or at a slant, depending on local practice.
Using local materials is just one aspect that makes the practice sustainable. The use of dry stone walls as retaining walls (preventing soil erosion) has largely been replaced by the use of concrete structures. Concrete, the material of modernity (Forty 2013), might as well be called the ‘material of the Anthropocene’: the production of cement is one of the major contributors to the emission of CO2 and therefore global warming. Choosing dry stone walls over concrete therefore has a, though admittedly small, positive impact on the environment. The practice of dry stone walling also minimises the use of power tools or excavators, further limiting its carbon footprint.
Following World War I, barbed wire was adopted in Switzerland as efficient technology that could replace dry stone walls as a way to control the movement of cattle. Dry stone walls may even be destroyed as they become a hindrance for modern agricultural practices, and barbed wire, or more recently electric fencing, be adopted instead. Dry stone walling thus goes hand-in-hand with agricultural practices that are more respectful of the environment.
New and Old Environmental Challenges
The concept of the Anthropocene offers social scientists new ways of telling stories about the complex relationship between humans and the environment, decentering the human, recognising the perspectives of other species and acknowledging the violence that humans have wrought on the planet (Chakrabarty 2014; Latour 2014). In the case of the Swiss Alps, an Anthropocene perspective enables the telling of stories alternative to the idealised ones of mountain life, pointing to changes brought about as a result of human activity, notably melting glaciers and loss of biodiversity (Krauß 2018).
The art of dry stone masonry has long been deployed as a response to local climatic conditions. This is highlighted in the text of UNESCO's decision (13.COM 10.B.10, para. 1), which states that dry stone walls ‘play a vital role in preventing landslides, floods and avalanches, and in combating erosion and desertification of the land, enhancing biodiversity and creating adequate microclimatic conditions for agriculture’. In Switzerland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dry stone walls were for instance the main technology used to mitigate the risks of avalanches (UFAM 2011). At several periods in the history of Switzerland, and most recently in the late nineteenth century, dry stone walling was also promoted, at times as a form of taxation in kind, to prevent deforestation as the need for wooden fencing to separate pastures and fields would otherwise deplete woodlands. Building dry stone walls in order to address environmental concerns is not new.
As noted above, one of the significant interests in dry stone walling practice in Switzerland today is its use in the promotion of biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity in the Alps is the result of changing conditions at the local level – such as changing agricultural practices – and the global level – climate change and other human-generated degradation of the environment (Chemini and Rizzoli 2003, 3). As Ivo Baur and Claudia Binder discuss (2013), the loss of subsistence farming resulted in the decreased extensiveness in the use of pastures, and the intensification of productive pastures reduced their ecological value, as intensively cultivated lands have less species diversity compared to extensively used pastures or forests.
Walls present particularly rich ecological affordances on otherwise relatively homogeneous agricultural land: they offer diverse nooks and crannies in which insects or mammals can nest or dwell in, dry (at the top, south-facing) or humid (at the base, north-facing) conditions suiting different species; they act as corridors offering relatively safe passage between one patch of woodland and another; and they are hunting grounds for predators (Ewald and Lobsiger 1997; Stoll 2000; Witschi 2018). In contrast, concrete walls, or walls built with mortar, do not offer the same nooks and crannies as a dry stone wall, thus limiting their ecological value. Electric fencing does not provide the cover that many species need, nor the surfaces for lichen or moss to grow on or lizards and snakes to bask in (thanks to the sun), and thus replacing walls with fencing has a negative impact on biodiversity. However, electric fencing can be combined with dry stone walling to offer benefits to the local fauna and flora; if placed at a short distance from the wall, fencing can prevent cattle from grazing alongside the wall, which leaves a strip of vegetation that increases the ecological value of walls and that, for instance, is used as hunting ground for stoats hiding in the stones.
In many senses, dry stone walling fruitfully questions artificial divides between nature and culture, as they use locally sourced materials, blend in the landscape, and have features that are exploited by a diversity of species as they would local rock formations. The next section considers how ecological awareness has become a key element of contemporary practice.
Ecological Knowledge and Communities of Practice
A defining feature of the intangible heritage is the active role of communities in supporting the nomination of practices to UNESCO – these are after all ‘living heritage’, which also implies that the heritage practices are in the constant process of change and renewal against claims to ‘authenticity’, which defined UNESCO's prior definitions (Bortolotto 2012). In the Swiss case, the joint application for the ‘Art of dry stone walling, knowledge and techniques’ to UNESCO included letters of support notably from the Swiss Federation of Dry Stone Masons (formed in 2005)1 and the Environmental Action Foundation,2 which was instrumental in revitalising the craft in Switzerland in the 1980s.
Since the revitalisation of the practices in Switzerland, we have witnessed a professionalisation of the practice. If in the past farmers might be involved in building walls, today they might instead call a professional waller. The Federation regroups wallers coming from a diversity of professions, or for whom dry stone walling is a complement to other activities, notably in the fields of forestry and landscaping. There is a degree of specialisation in the profession, where wallers might primarily build walls in pastures or retaining walls to be included as part of major engineering works.
The community of expert masons interacts and collaborates with other interested parties, be they environmental NGOs, regional park civil servants or scientists. Together, they might be identified as communities of practice, which can be defined as ‘groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ (Wenger et al. 2002: 4). For instance, project funders such as the Swiss Funds for Landscape, an independent government body, has collaborated with wallers to formulate best practices. Biologists and regional park officials will share ecological knowledge with wallers. It is these new actors and the expansion of communities of practice of dry stone walling that are shaping contemporary practice. In such collaborations, new meanings and purposes are formulated: from the original purpose of walls as barriers and retaining structures, they come to be seen, understood and at times purposefully modified to act as habitats with the aim of fostering biodiversity. Collaborations include, for instance, a pilot project on the creation of nesting caches for stoats that was initiated by one of Switzerland's regional parks, the Parc Jura Vaudois.3 Parks are motivated to protect stoats, both for their ecological role and as predators who can keep in check vermin on agricultural lands. In this project, wallers were given sketches and details of ideal measurements of caches that are particularly suited for stoats, and could receive extra funding for building them.
By sharing their knowledge, scientists invite wallers to look at their work in a different light. One of the fundamental insights that biologists contribute pertains to the importance of not rebuilding or repairing walls. Newly made walls offer fewer affordances to species – when made well, the wall is dense and offers few cavities of appropriate size for many species (hence the interest in building purposely designed caches). With time, the effects of the elements, the movement of the terrain, seedlings that grow into trees pushing against the stones, or cattle toppling stones as they rub against the walls cause the stones to loosen and offer more opportunities for a variety of species. A very old wall that has collapsed almost entirely is once more unwelcoming, as it no longer offers sufficient cover, nooks or crannies. The walls that offer the greatest diversity of affordances to insects and animals tend therefore to be old but not too old (see Ewald and Lobsiger 1997). The recommendation to regional parks and masons in planning rebuilding work is therefore to not rebuild too soon and to only rebuild sections of an old wall at one time so as to not overly disturb the wildlife that inhabits the length of the wall. Building new walls remains essential, however: wallers are effectively building for the flora and fauna of the following decades and centuries.
The text of the UNESCO decision underlines the importance of creating learning structures for the promotion of the art of dry stone walling. Communities of practice are sustained by the training of newcomers. The Swiss Federation of Dry Stone Masons has developed a modular course, mostly geared towards forming professionals who often learn dry stone as a complement to an existing activity but open also to enthusiasts or individuals planning a private project. Significantly, of the four modules that make up the course leading up to an exam and certification, one is devoted to the ecological significance of dry stone walls and disseminates best practices to ensure that walls can be optimised to respond to this new environmental role they have been given.
Through interactions with actors in the environmental field, or by taking courses, wallers gain an awareness of the ecological implications of their work. On several occasions, a waller pointed out to me how they could only partially fill a gap in the wall in a way that could both ensure the integrity of the wall and offer a space for some insect, reptile or mammal to nest. One waller, having participated in the aforementioned stoats project, mentioned that even after the end of the project he would build a cache when he came across a stone that he thought would be particularly suited for this. As mentioned above, wallers insist that the stones inform the work; in this case, stones not only informed the waller on how to use them to build a structurally sound wall, but also on how to make it more inviting to a non-human creature. Wallers need not have ecological knowledge to create benefits for biodiversity through the act of building walls; however, ecological awareness, informed by the intervention of scientists, is further bringing ecological value to the practice.
One might add a caveat to this discussion. It might actually not be constructive to reduce the value of walls to their ecological value, as this might lead to building walls in places where no tradition of such constructions exists or even where stones are just not available and need to be imported – for instance in urban environments. The ecological value of walls is thus not easily, or fruitfully, distinguished from their value as cultural heritage.4
Conclusion
Dry stone walls are flexible, they respond to movements of the terrain and effects of weather, and this flexibility is what makes them particularly durable. The practice itself is flexible; following the two universal principles of gravity and friction, it adapts to local conditions, stones and terrain, and is informed by local styles. It is also proving to be flexible in the way it has included new purposes and new perspectives.
At its core, the practice of dry stone walling is sustainable. It employs local natural materials and rejects the use of new or imported materials such as mortar or concrete. Compared to alternatives, it operates with a much smaller carbon footprint. As part of landscapes of traditional alpine pastures, walls become part of agricultural practices that are less intensive and less detrimental to the environment. Beyond the strict practices and materials, walling practices are also sustainable in their relationship to the local fauna and flora. If walls have always offered ecological benefits, a new awareness of their ecological role has developed against the current backdrop of loss of biodiversity caused by climate change and changing agricultural practices.
In contrast to previous conceptions of heritage, the IHC promotes heritage that is living, and necessarily changing. Change in practices might not just imply technical change, but also change in meanings and purposes of practices. In the case of dry stone walling, these purposes now extending beyond a strict utilitarian value to include identitarian and ecological purposes. The craft would not be as widely practised as it is today if not for this change of purposes, which also brings financial incentives in the form notably of government subsidies.
The Convention puts much emphasis on the role of communities in identifying and keeping alive intangible heritage. The discussion I have presented points to the way changes in a craft can, or necessarily, imply changes in the composition of communities of practice. In the case of dry stone walling, not just wallers, but scientists, NGOs and government bodies come together with shared values – heritage, ecology, identity – and collaborate in shaping the craft to address contemporary needs, including to address ecological concerns.
The case of dry stone walling knowledge points to the intriguing, and unsettling, connections between loss of craft practices and loss of biodiversity – and conversely, the potential for promotion of biodiversity with the promotion of craft practices. This highlights the potential of the Convention to contribute responses to the environmental and climate crises. There is further work to be done to understand and conceptualise this relationship between what we might call ‘praxeodiversity’, and biodiversity. For this, it might be opportune to further break down conceptual barriers between nature and culture. Dry stone walling points to how the work of shaping walls is not just a human activity, but involves other actors such as seedlings, cattle, weather (including increasingly extreme weather patterns), and a variety of wall plant and animal dwellers. Human activity – whether desctructive or productive – cannot be isolated from the background of a rapidly, and worryingly, changing world. Dry stone walling, as discussed in this article, is just one illustration of how a practice recognised as intangible heritage can reinvent itself to address new local and global concerns in the Anthropocene.
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research was provided by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie mobility fellowship (grant no. 101022703). I gained much of my knowledge relating to the ecological significance of dry stone walls during the ecology module course organised by the Swiss Federation of Dry Stone Masons and the interventions of the instructors Sylvain Ursenbacher, Julie Steffen and Claude Fischer. I am grateful to the dry stone wallers who shared their knowledge and thoughts with me, and in particular Laurent Cattin, Stefan Meier, Christian Feuz, Gerhard Stoll and Eric Jeanneaux. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are of course my own.
Notes
I am grateful to Mr Antoine Giovannini of the Swiss Funds for Landscape (Fonds Landschaft Schweiz) for pointing this out (personal communication, 4 September 2023).
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