A Landscape Interpretation of Island Villages in Korean Southwest Sea

한국 서남해 섬마을의 경관체계해석 -진도군 조도군도, 신안군 비 금, 도초, 우이도 및 흑산군도를 중심으로-

The landscape systems in Korean island settlements can be recognized as results of ingabitants' ecological adptation to the isolated environment with the limited natural resources. Both the fishery dominant industry in island society and ecological nature of its environments seem to have influenced on inhabitants' environmental cognition as well as the physical landscape of island villages such as its location, spatial pattern in each village, housing form and so on. This study was done mainly by both refering to the related documents and direct observations in case study areas, and results of the study can be summarized as follows. 1. In general, the landscape of an individual island seems to take more innate characteristics of island's own, corresponding to the degree of isolation from mainland. That is, while the landscape of island in neighboring waters takes both inland-like and island-innate landscape character at the same time, the one in the open sea far from land takes more innate landscape character of all island's own in the aspects of village location, land use and housing density etc. 2. The convex landform of most islands brings about more centrifugal village allocation than centripetal allocation in most inland villages. And thus most villages in each island face extremely diverse directions different from the south facing preference in most inland rural villages. 3. Most island villages tend to be located along the ecologically transitional strip between land and sea, so called 'line of life', rather than between hilly slope and flat land as being in most inland village locations. So they are located with marine ecology bounded fishing ground ahead and land ecology bounded agricultural site at the back of them. 4. The settlement pattern of the island fishing villages shows more compact spatial structure than that of inland agricultural villages, due to the absolute limits of usable land resources and the adaptation to the marine environment with severe sea winds and waves or for the easy accessability to the fishing grounds. And also the managerial patterns of public owned sea weed catching ground, which take each family as the unit of usership rather than an individual, seem to make the villagescape more compact and the size of Individual residence smaller than that of inland agricultural village. 5. The folk shrine('Dand') systems, in persrective of villagescape, represent innate environmental cognition of island inhabitants above all other cultural landscape elements in the island. Usually the kinds and the meanings of island's communal shrine and its allocative patternsin island villagescape are composed of set with binary opposition, for example 'Upper shrine(representing 'earth', 'mountain' or 'fire')' and 'Lower Shrine(representing 'sea', 'dragon' or 'water') are those. They are usually located at contrary positions in villagescape each other. That is, they are located at 'the virtical center or visual terminus(Upper shrine at hillside behind the village)' and 'the border or entrance(Lower Shrine at seashore in front of the village)'. Each of these shirines' divinity coincides with each subsystem of island's natural eco-system(earth sphere vs marine sphere) and they also contribute to ecological conservation, bonded with the 'Sacred Forest(usually with another function of windbreak)' or 'Sacred Natural Fountain' nearby them, which are representatives of island's natural resources.