The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions ─ Strategies for Investigating Anthropogenic Landscapes, Dynamic Environments, and Climate Change in the Human Past

The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one.

This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

Daniel A. Contreras is Visiting Researcher at the University of Kiel, Germany. He is an archaeologist focused on human-environment interactions in the past, particularly anthropogenic and geomorphic components of dynamic landscapes and environmental change. This interest has led to fieldwork in Peru, Jordan, Mexico, Guatemala, Turkey, Greece, and Honduras. He has recently completed a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Institute of Ecosystem Research at the University of Kiel.