Carl Ortwin Sauer

Sauer argued that human cultures transform a natural landscape into a cultural one through settlement, farming, technology, and custom. He stated this position in his influential 1925 essay The Morphology of Landscape.

The Berkeley School was an approach associated with Sauer and his students at the University of California, Berkeley. It emphasized fieldwork, landscape history, material culture, and the visible effects of human activity on environments.

Sauer rejected the idea that climate and terrain mechanically determine how societies develop. His work instead treated culture as an active force capable of reshaping environments in many different ways.

Sauer researched agricultural origins, plant and animal domestication, Indigenous land use, and the environmental effects of European expansion. His 1952 work Agricultural Origins and Dispersals connected geography with the history of cultivated plants.