Carl O. Sauer

Carl O. Sauer was an American geographer who reshaped cultural geography through studies of landscapes, agriculture, and human influence on the environment.

Berkeley School of Geography: A group of geographers at the University of California, Berkeley, associated with historical and regional approaches to cultural landscapes. Sauer led this school, which trained generations of cultural geographers.
Cultural landscape: A landscape shaped by human activity, including settlement, land use, architecture, and cultural practice. Sauer made the cultural landscape a central object of geographical study.
The Morphology of Landscape: Sauer’s 1925 essay arguing that cultural forces transform natural landscapes into cultural landscapes. This essay states the method and landscape concepts most closely associated with Sauer.
Environmental history: The study of how human societies and natural environments have influenced one another through time. Sauer’s historical attention to human changes in nature anticipated central concerns of this field.
Alfred L. Kroeber: An American anthropologist whose work on culture and history influenced anthropology and Indigenous studies. Kroeber’s historical anthropology helped shape Sauer’s view of culture as a force acting on landscapes.
Environmental determinism: The theory that physical environments directly determine societies’ cultural and historical development. Sauer rejected its causal claims in favor of historical study of human-environment relations.
Agricultural origins: The emergence of plant cultivation and animal domestication in multiple regions during prehistory. Sauer investigated how agriculture began and spread through human choices and cultural contact.
Historical ecology: The study of long-term interactions between human societies and ecosystems, using historical and ecological evidence. Sauer’s landscape histories helped encourage research into enduring human influence on ecosystems.
Robert H. Lowie: An Austrian-born American anthropologist known for research on Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and for critiques of cultural evolutionism. Lowie’s anthropology formed part of the intellectual environment Sauer encountered at Berkeley.
Possibilism: A geographical perspective holding that environments offer constraints and opportunities while human cultures shape choices among them. Possibilism helps explain the agency Sauer assigned to culture without denying environmental limits.

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