Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association最新文献

The theoretical and methodological toolkits developed under political ecology have become increasingly relevant in current discussions of environmental impacts, sustainability, and inequality. We developed this volume to identify the unique perspectives that archaeologists offer to the field of political ecology. The archaeology of political ecology is founded on a long and diverse history focused on issues relating to environments, the human–nature relationship, ontology, property, power, and inequality. We outline this history to demonstrate that political ecology and archaeology inform one another through shared interests and research foci. More importantly, we highlight how the two fields can and do benefit through their partnership. Ultimately this volume serves as an invitation for interdisciplinary research that aims to better elucidate the complexities and nuances of human–environmental interaction.

Archaeology and anthropology generally share with geography an interest in the relationship of humans to their environments. This relationship involves material exchanges but also draws from social relations as well as political, symbolic, and religious practices. Thus, while climate and natural resources shape human biology and culture over time, human culture and politics have reciprocal impacts on the environment, cross-culturally and across time. This has become the realm of political ecology. Well-known cases of such impact in historical and modern contexts highlight contrasts between views of Thomas Malthus and Esther Boserup on connections between population size and food supplies, or between the spread of infectious diseases and socioeconomic standing. More succinctly, Paul Robbins (2012, 14) asserts: “political ecology represents an explicit alternative to ‘apolitical’ ecology.” Contributors to this volume raise thought provoking issues in political ecology from an archeological perspective, simultaneously reporting concrete findings and inspiring new lines of research in richly varied cultural and environmental contexts. This chapter discusses insights and challenges in the collective contributions, presented via three themes: (1) inequality in access to landscape resources; (2) multiplicity of time frames, from events to long-term; and (3) the potential characteristics of “nature” in political ecological dynamics. The chapter closes with summary thoughts on why the archaeology of political ecology matters.

Iceland was settled by the Norse ca. 870 CE. Within the next few centuries, 40% of Iceland's soil cover was lost to deforestation and erosion. By the late medieval period, the social landscape had also changed from a population of nominally equal landowning households to one comprised mostly of tenant farmers subject to a small class of elite landlords. Interpretations of the changing landscape have described the Norse as unaware of the environmental consequences of their agricultural practices, or as thoughtfully responsive to degrading conditions. Using estimates of the available biomass in different regions and measurements of changing soil depth in lowland Langholt, Skagafjörður, we suggest that what appears to modern researchers as catastrophic environmental devastation was in part an agricultural benefit, at least to some people. While some farmers did well, others were forced to leave failing land and enter service or tenancy. At the same time, agricultural strategies focused on transhumant pastoralism and production of grass fodder created distinct changes to the landscape that reinforced the emerging social hierarchy until it came to seem natural and inevitable. We imagine the earliest Icelanders not as violent raiders of the landscape, nor as sensitive custodians of a changing environment, but as intelligent farmers and politicians who mobilized the transformed landscape into a political economy that would keep their farms productive and their descendants in power for a millennium.

Recent work in castle studies has moved away from their military role, towards a stress on social life, aesthetics, symbolism, and “status.” While this social-cultural turn is a marked advance, it has not always been thought through in an anthropological or theorized way; nor have social-cultural interpretations been related to everyday practices. Consequently, “social” analyses of castles have tended to be rather disembodied, and to be limited in their accounts of power and inequality. In this paper, I sketch out what a political ecology of the castle might look like, with reference to the late medieval castle of Bodiam in south-east England. I focus on how the castle and its surrounding landscape work to control, delimit, and define flows—flows of things, of animals, and of people, circulating in and around the castle and its context. Flows work at a series of different scales ranging from the position and practices of the human body within castle spaces, to the local and regional, to the networks of religion and power across Europe and beyond. Things, animals, and people move within and around the castle hall and kitchens, upper and lower courtyards, the ancillary buildings of demesne farm, deerpark, fishponds and estate, the local, regional, and wider landscape and environment. Material flows help define the nature and scope of social relations; the description of such flows allows a clearer idea of the castle's role in materializing inequality to be delineated and understood.

In this paper I utilize the perspective of political ecology to guide the study of incipient urbanization in the Preclassic site of Noh K'uh in Chiapas, Mexico. In my analysis of landscape formation and local settlement patterns, I demonstrate how the relationship between people and the environment was particularly intimate within the valley that is home to Noh K'uh. In this case, orientation, architecture, and natural landmarks demonstrate the physical manifestation of political, social, and ritual organization in this Late Preclassic community. By emphasizing the political ecology perspective, I am able to outline how ritual and politics used features of a sacred world to create and organize an incipient urban community in the New World.

In this paper, political ecology informs a study of agriculture under the Neo-Assyrian empire. Rather than examining cultivation solely as an economy of subsistence practices, this work considers agrarian laborers, activities, and resources as participants in wider political processes of empire-building. Both material and discursive manipulations of agriculture are discussed in order to demonstrate the ways in which rulers of Neo-Assyria instituted agricultural colonization in Upper Mesopotamia for political gain. An archaeobotanical case study from the provincial capital of Tušhan is then presented to provide a closer look at the impact of these agro-politics on the people and lands in the provinces of the empire. Plant use studies from Tušhan capture the flow of power through agricultural practice, emphasize the Neo-Assyrian monarchy's rhetorical use of agriculture in strategies of imperialism, and, significantly, reveal the shortcomings of the empire's agrarian program.

This paper examines the political ecology of an 80 km² region of central Karnataka, detailing how social relationships of inequality were linked with the production of a variety of meaningful places and environmental resources in Iron Age (1200–300 BCE) South India. Such analysis is then intersected with modern framings of inselberg landforms as spaces of “Nature,” demonstrating how such framings potentially silence humans in their environmental history and reproduce a nature–society binary that has substantial implications for the politics of land use and conservation today. In doing so, the paper critically considers the implications and limitations of a posthumanist political ecology that advocates nonhumans as “actors” that contribute to socio-political histories for understanding the politics of environmental production, both past and present.

Utilizing a practice theory approach with multiscalar data, we combined mound form, internal mound features, and skeletal data to investigate how corporate identity was created and represented within Wisconsin Effigy Mound communities. There is evidence for a widespread ritual and social system shared by participants. However, contextual and biological variability and other idiosyncrasies in material culture among mound groups suggest deliberate actions demarcating identity through symbolism and ritual performance. Our results reflect this, suggesting at least two distinct corporate identities: (1) a larger, overarching communal identity with regionally shared effigy mound construction and select ritual paraphernalia, and (2) a localized, corporate kin-based identity with variation in the type and location of goods within and between the mounds.

From the perspective of social archaeology, it seems bioarchaeology has been slow to recognize its social-interpretive potential. However, I think that “community” might be the key to unlocking this potential. As an interested outsider, I try here to explain the motivations and priorities of social-interpretive archaeologies, and to place the papers in this volume within the broader network of anthropological and archaeological theory. I also comment on the issues of boundaries and boundedness, scale, metaphor, and memory, all of which, one might argue, are social topics that have remained just beyond the reach of “traditional” bioarchaeology.