Landscape as ecological study commonly emphasizes long-term interaction between humans and the terrain on and in which they live. A principal advantage of such a perspective is the enhanced potential for recognizing climatic, geomorphic, economic, ideational, and/or political change in a single defined setting. This combined temporal and environmental focus relates to the long-durSe of Braudel and the Annales School of history. Although landscapes are often described as comprising palimpsests of cumulative change, archaeologists focus alternately on identifying either episodes within the sequence or their cumulative effects.
Geomorphic changes in the landscape include localized human and geological effects, as well as more widely experienced effects from climate shifts. Fluvial hydrology, for example, reveals alterations wrought by natural forces of alluviation and erosion, and also recognizes human intervention. The degraded modern landscape of Greece has long been attributed to combined effects of farming and climate change; working in the Argolid specifically, van Andel and Runnels attribute the situation more specifically to Bronze Age and Byzantine episodes of major soil erosion, involving archaeological and geomorphic evidence of rapid forest clearing for agriculture with no substantial soil conservation measures. In Oaxaca, Mexico, of the late first millennium BC, Joyce and Mueller document that intensification of agriculture in the highlands around Monte Albiin immediately preceded an increased sediment load in the rivers draining the watershed. The result transformed hydrology and boosted agricultural potentials far downstream, in the broad Rio Verde Valley at the Pacific coast. The ramifications of geomorphic and anthropogenic changes to the landscape can have dramatic and long-lasting impact on human and other life.
Many ecological studies are more directly economic in focus, examining evidence of human land use and ecological potentials. In the 1960s, Vita-Finzi and Higgs were influential in examining foraging and farming landscapes in the Levant, developing retro-dictive models of what economic strategies were plausible in light of inferred technologies, demography, and landforms of Paleolithic and Neolithic times. More than two decades later, Kirch extended social inference of such study, in Polynesia contexts. After he had assessed the differential resources and subsistence capacities of varied islands, as well as their archaeological records of human occupation, landscape archaeology allowed him to link contrasts between trajectories of demographic prosperity and ecological disaster to degrees of cooperation-based social organization, as well as in subsistence strategies per se.
These and related inquiries for some define historical ecology, a pursuit intersecting with landscape archaeology, in which analysts highlight the cumulative political and economic relations between people and the land, over hundreds and often thousands of years, frequently with implications for the present day. In Burgundy, for example, Crumley and Marquardt’s research has documented the impact of factors as diverse as the Roman conquest and climate change on the lives of the Celtic populace of the region from the Late Iron Age through the Middle Ages.
Landscape approaches are crucial for inquiries about large-scale land management strategies, the transformation of extensive tracts, and the social order responsible for these actions. As Erickson’s work documents, the extent of artificial terracing in pre-Columbian Andean landscapes attests to labor investment in antiquity on a collective, cumulative scale even larger than that involved in construction of civic buildings, and at least several hundred years before imperial Inka labor tribute levies. Although features of agricultural intensification are massive in aggregate, however, Erickson’s ethnoarchaeological studies reveal that the labor involved did not always or necessarily require oversight by authority more centralized than a network of kin groups. This Andean research has had clear, constructive implications for agricultural development programs today.
Many ancient peoples have modified surface hydrology, as well as topography. In the Maya lowlands, for example, extensive, if often subtle alteration began as early as 400 BC, in Preclassic times, directing water to plaster-lined reservoirs instead of letting it escape through porous karst limestone bedrock, where it thereby would have eluded reach of humans. In this case, and in contrast to at least parts of the Andean terracing just cited, the concentration of water resources, their eventual focus on providing water to urban centers, and the magnitude of modification over hundreds of square kilometers are thought ultimately to imply centralized direction and control.
Indeed, landscape inquiry has confirmed extensive and long-standing ecological management around the globe, by societies with quite varied characteristics of size and internal organization. Because of that, the idea of pristine landscapes, unmodified by humans, has become untenable virtually anywhere. Through landscape inquiry, the vast expanse of Amazonia has yielded evidence for millenia of human intervention, in earthworks as well as indications of repeated forest cutting. Inference that Australia’s outback was ‘untouched’ any time recently is similarly misleading, on the basis of geographic and archaeological findings, as well as resounding testimony in Aboriginal narratives.
World History
