Where Memory Settles: Terroir, Tools, and the Material Practice of Place

Memory is not stored solely in human minds but is distributed across people, materials, tools, and environments, particularly in historic wooden neighborhoods. Drawing on the WoodiSH project, the article proposes expanding the concept of terroir—originally from viticulture—to describe how landscape, materials, craft traditions, and human practices shape the character and memory of place. Combining material culture studies, phenomenology, and 4E cognition with Tim Ingold's meshwork and wayfaring, the authors argue that knowledge about built heritage emerges through movement and practical interaction with material environments. Historic wooden neighborhoods in Trondheim, Vilnius, and Pori are living archives where traces of use, repair, and everyday life accumulate. Heritage environments should be understood as pedagogical and cognitive landscapes, not merely objects of preservation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article explores how memory emerges through material environments and em-bodied practices in historic wooden neighbourhoods. Drawing on research from the WoodiSH project (Wooden Cities: Memory, Sustainability and Craft in Historic Neigh-bourhoods), the study examines how knowledge and cultural memory become embed-ded in-built environments through everyday practices of dwelling, repair, and craft. The article proposes the concept of terroir as a conceptual framework for understand-ing historic environments as place-bound ecologies of memory. Originally associated with viticulture, terroir is here expanded to describe how relationships between land-scape, materials, craft traditions, and human practices shape the character and memory of place. By combining this concept with theoretical perspectives from mate-rial culture studies, phenomenology, and 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition), the article argues that memory is not located solely in human minds but distributed across people, materials, tools, and environments. The discussion further draws on Tim Ingold’s concepts of meshwork and wayfaring to show how knowledge about built heritage emerges through movement, engagement, and practical interaction with material environments. Historic wooden neighbour-hoods in Trondheim, Vilnius, and Pori are approached as living archives in which traces of use, repair, and everyday life accumulate in buildings and landscapes. The article concludes by suggesting that heritage environments should be understood not only as objects of preservation but also as pedagogical and cognitive landscapes. Through attentive engagement with materials, surfaces, and practices, researchers, craftspeople, and residents participate in ongoing dialogues with the past. Memory, in this perspective, is not simply remembered—it is encountered, inhabited, and sus-tained through material practice.