Environmental archaeology

This article is about the subfield of archaeology. For the journal, see Environmental Archaeology.
Two men in a field of wheat struggling to push a rod into soil.
Geoarchaeological survey of stratigraphic units using a versatile coring unit, a common tool for environmental archaeologists.

Environmental archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology which emerged in 1970s[1] and is the science of reconstructing the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in.[2][3] The field represents an archaeological-palaeoecological approach to studying the palaeoenvironment through the methods of human palaeoecology and other geosciences. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provide archaeologists with insights into the origins and evolution of anthropogenic environments and human systems. This includes subjects such as including prehistoric lifestyle adaptations to change and economic practices.[4]

Environmental archaeology is commonly divided into three sub-fields:

Environmental archaeology often involves studying plant and animal remains in order to investigate which plant and animal species were present at the time of prehistoric habitations, and how past societies managed them. It may also involve studying the physical environment and how similar or different it was in the past compared to the present day. An important component of such analyses represents the study of site formation processes.[5]

This field is particularly useful when artifacts may be absent from an excavated or surveyed site, or in cases of earth movement, such as erosion, which may have buried artifacts and archaeological features. While specialist sub-fields, for example bioarchaeology or geomorphology, are defined by the materials they study, the term "environmental" is used as a general template in order to denote a general field of scientific inquiry that is applicable across time periods and geographical regions studied by archaeology as a whole.[6]

  1. ^ O'Connor, Terry (2019). "Pinned Down in the Trenches? Revisiting environmental archaeology". Internet Archaeology (53). doi:10.11141/ia.53.5.
  2. ^ "What is Environmental Archaeology?". Florida Museum of Natural History. University of Florida. Retrieved 6 June 2016.
  3. ^ Wilkinson, Keith (2003). Environmental Archaeology: Approaches, Techniques & Applications. Stroud: Tempus. ISBN 0-7524-1931-5.
  4. ^ Branch, Nick (2014). Environmental Archaeology: Theoretical and Practical Approaches. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-340-80871-9.
  5. ^ Kris, Hirst. "Site Formation Processes". about education. Archived from the original on 17 February 2017. Retrieved 6 June 2016.
  6. ^ Butzer, Karl W. (2012). "Collapse, environment, and society". PNAS. 109 (10): 3632–3639. doi:10.1073/pnas.1114845109. PMC 3309741. PMID 22371579.