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Landscape legacies: archaeological approaches to domestication in the landscape

Friday 4th July: 08:30 - 10:30
2 hour session: 5-10 minute position papers followed by discussion to conclude

Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (University of Cambridge)
Alexander Herrera (Universidad de los Andes, Departamento de Antropologia)

Abstract

An important paradigm shift is taking place in archaeology as knowledge about long-term trajectories of anthropogenic landscape transformation accrues. This shift calls for caution in addressing environments exclusively as self-regulating and equilibrium-seeking systems to which individuals or cultures adapt or adapted. Instead it encourages a consideration of the biotic and abiotic components of inhabited landscapes as historically-contingent outcomes of human niche-building, past and present. Among these dynamics, the intensification and localization of symbiotic relations with other species - what we commonly gloss as plant and animal domestication - can be considered as one of the most important factors inducing specific, indeed emergent trajectories of landscape evolution during the Holocene. Reciprocally, domestication processes and other mutualistic relations are recurring inter-specific dynamics that take place within, indeed depend on, the affordances of specific yet changing environs - landscapes that were inhabited and modified by human communities in particular ways. This session focuses on the study of those instances of anthropogenic landscape transformation that are inextricably related to the intensification and reproduction of symbiotic relations between human communities and other species, i.e. on the trans-generational dynamic of landscape domestication. The following paper proposals are invited: a) case studies that approach the relation between domestication and landscape history employing the toolkit of environmental archaeology, broadly defined; and b) overviews of diachronic trajectories of landscape domestication that rely on the integration of archaeological and environmental data at a regional level. The approach of the session is comparative, its scope global.

Papers