Margareth Lanzinger

The project "ALPINNCONNECT" centres on operating trans-European commercial traffic. Margareth Lanzinger and her team focus on the interplay of various agents, material prerequisites and impacts of nature along main Alpine transit routes by applying an approach of socio-material-natural interconnectedness. Transit traffic required a broad participation to cope with the enormous efforts and provided an important source of income. Innkeepers in particular acted as connecting agents and inns operated as multipurpose hubs. Transportation was an expanding economy in early modern Europe developing diverse and competing forms of organisation connected with roads, mule tracks and rivers in challenging alpine landscapes.