3
Historical Ecology: Using What Works
to Cross the Divide
William J. Meyer and Carole L. Crumley
1 IN TR O D U C T I O N
In this contribution, we advance historical ecology as one of a number of
approaches to new studies of the first millennium bc. Crumley and her colleagues
have elaborated this cluster of concepts over thirty years of fieldwork in southern
Burgundy, integrating the methods and theories of several disciplines. In the later
part of this essay, we provide a guideline for how a research team might organize a
historical ecological project (in this case, a study of Atlantic Europe during the
first millennium bc). We intend this outline to fill a gap in the current literature
by providing a ‘scalable’ model for future studies in historical ecology; one useful
at any number of geographic and/or temporal scales.
2 W H A T IS H I S T O R I C A L EC O L O G Y ?
Historical ecology is a cluster of concepts that offers a holistic, practical perspective to the study of environmental change. It may be applied to spatial and
temporal frames at any resolution, but finds particularly rich data sources at
what is loosely termed the ‘landscape’ scale—where human activity and biophysical systems interact and archaeological, historical, and ethnographic records are
plentiful. The term assumes a definition of ecology that includes humans as a
component of all ecosystems, and a definition of history that encompasses both
the history of the Earth system as well as the social and physical past of our species
(Balée 2006; Crumley 2007b). Historical ecology is predicated upon the assumption that it is possible to construct an evidence-validated narrative of landscape
transformation resulting from the continual interaction between (spatially and
temporally) diverse human activities and changing environmental conditions.
Historical ecology is a term that may not be familiar to archaeologists, but
its salient characteristics will be recognized as those which undergird most
archaeological practice. Chief among these are emphases on transdisciplinarity
and on collaborative research. Historical ecology perforce draws on a broad
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spectrum of concepts, methods, theories, and evidence, taken from the biological
and physical sciences, ecology, the social sciences, and the humanities. For
example, inasmuch as ethnographically documented traditional environmental
knowledge (TEK) is equally valued with science, historical ecology draws from
cultural ecology. Recently, theoretical ecology has also contributed to its development with a sophisticated approach to the study of complex adaptive systems
termed ‘resilience’ (Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003; Gunderson and Holling
2002; Holling 1973). The independent data sets derived from the standard procedures of these various disciplines provide critical ‘cross-checks’ upon one
another, revealing patterns of association to researchers and often yielding further
intriguing questions.
Historical ecology is a framework designed to assist collaboration among
differently trained researchers and other stakeholders who could be impacted by
a project, including the residents of the area under study. This framework
provides a kind of intellectual ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1991) in which these diverse
communities can exchange information about the past and present of a physical
region and discuss various courses of action for its future. As in any contact zone,
such exchanges require a strong commitment to dialogue, extensive translation,
and significant efforts at coordination.
2.1 The development of historical ecology
Edward S. Deevey, who directed the Historical Ecology Project at the University of
Florida in the early 1970s, introduced the term ‘historical ecology’. Deevey’s son
Brian finds the first mention of historical ecology in his father’s publications of
1964. His father used the term ‘palaeo-ecology’ in letters home to his parents as
early as 1936, and the younger Deevey speculates that his father later switched to
historical ecology as a more popular-sounding equivalent.
In the early 1980s, historian Lester J. Bilsky solicited the contributions of
anthropologists, a human ecologist, an economist, and fellow historians for
Historical Ecology: Essays on environment and social change (1980). Not long
after, anthropologist Alice Ingerson organized a session on historical ecology at
the 1984 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. This
session addressed the chasm between cultural (e.g. nature as metaphor) and
environmental (e.g. energy cycle) studies within anthropology, and explored
political economy and social history approaches in the discipline.
By the late 1980s, Crumley (Crumley and Marquardt 1987)—drawing on
anthropology, archaeology, history, and the biophysical sciences—identified historical ecology as an approach to the study of regional change. Later, she collaborated with an evolutionary ecologist, archaeologists, and anthropologists to
produce the edited volume Historical Ecology: Cultural knowledge and changing
landscapes (Crumley 1994). Independent of Crumley and her colleagues’ work,
William Balée and colleagues, working in South America, enriched the traditional
cultural ecology approach to include history. Balée organized a conference of
anthropologists, historians, and geographers at Tulane University in 1994; the
papers were published as Advances in Historical Ecology (Balée 1998).
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Working together since the mid-1990s, Balée and Crumley have furthered the
approach with the creation of two fruitful publishing venues for historical ecology.
The first was a Columbia University Press series which produced seven volumes.
Their current series focuses on applications of historical ecology and is published
by Left Coast Press.
2.2 A conceptual toolbox
As Bruce Winterhalder noted in his contribution to Historical Ecology, ‘historical
ecology might mean several things: a commitment to certain theoretical principles,
a methodology or form of investigation, a predilection to certain topics, or investigation within a framework provided by a certain set of concepts’ (Winterhalder
1994: 18). The question of how to think about historical ecology has presented itself
time and again, even bedevilling us as we began work on this essay. At varying
points, practitioners have thought to describe this creature as a discipline, as a
method, and as a theory (or body of theories). We submit that none of these labels
is quite appropriate.
A discipline might be thought of as a branch of knowledge, instruction, or
learning with particular perspectives arrived at and reproduced through regular,
systematic action. Scientific disciplines are recognizable in the routinized activities
of their practitioners, in the equipment that they enrol, in the material or
phenomena that they examine, as well as in the regularized nature of their
research questions, their hypotheses, and the results that they obtain. By contrast,
practitioners of historical ecology are far more concerned with ‘using what
works’ than with disciplinary routines. Historical ecology not only looks to
integrate conclusions from otherwise separate sources, it requires this kind of
integration. In this sense, it is not simply transdisciplinary, but poly-disciplinary.
The flexibility of thought and action engendered by this poly-disciplinarity leaves
the label of ‘discipline’ both imprecise and inadequate to describe historical
ecology.
For similar reasons, ‘method’ also falls short. If we consider methods to be the
regular and systematic procedures and techniques characteristic of a particular
discipline, the problem becomes readily apparent. Just as historical ecology draws
on several different disciplines in studying a topic, so too does it employ the many
different methods offered by them. Without compromising scientific rigour,
historical ecology values methodological practicality above formalism.
Related to methods are theories. Theories are systematically organized bodies of
knowledge applicable in a variety of circumstances. In science, they are systems of
assumptions, accepted principles, and procedural rules designed to analyse, predict, or otherwise explain the nature of phenomena being examined. While
methods are the means by which scientists interact directly with the world(s)
that they study, theories guide this interaction. Researchers adhering to different
theories or bodies of theory might choose to utilize the same methods, though
perhaps with different expectations and/or explanations of the outcome. The
results derived from applying a particular method are then used to expand or
revise the theory that directed the analysis. As a conceptual framework which
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guides how researchers think about and act within the world, ‘theory’ comes close
to describing what historical ecology is.
Balée is a strong advocate of the notion that historical ecology is a body of
theory, identifying ‘a core of interdependent postulates’ that it uses to explain
human/biosphere interactions (Balée 1998: 14). While his postulates capture a
number of the concerns that lie at the core of historical ecology, Balée overlooks
the reality that any single concern might be addressed very differently by
researchers from different, firmly established theoretical backgrounds. For example, a gender archaeologist is likely to adopt a far different approach to testing
hypotheses than a processual archaeologist. Historical ecology is far more adaptable to the purposes of its practitioners than feminist theory, queer theory, or New
Archaeology, each of which tends to demand that its users accept a more rigid set
of core principles. This mutability is one of historical ecology’s major strengths,
but it is also the quality that most challenges the description of historical ecology
as a theory.
But having ruled out historical ecology as a discipline, method, or theory,
what is left to describe it? Winterhalder’s final option is perhaps the most
appropriate: ‘investigation within a framework provided by a certain set of
concepts’ (Winterhalder 1994: 18). Concepts are flexible, both in the breadth of
their applicability and in the fact that they are given to change. Because of this
flexibility, they are particularly useful heuristics whose importance is often overlooked. We see historical ecology as a cluster or ‘toolbox’ of concepts.
Ironically, concepts do not go very far or change very much without theory and
methods (perhaps explaining why it is so difficult to appropriately describe
historical ecology). It is important to understand all at once the concept, the
abstract theories that address it, and the practical methods used to explore it. This
robust balance is illustrated most simply by a triad of concept, method, and
theory, as on the left side of figure 3.1.
But this concept-method-theory triad is highly oversimplified. In reality, no
single method characterizes any particular theory; no single theory requires any
particular method. Further, the same theories and methods—in similar or different combinations—can be used to explore more than one concept. Finally, no
concept exists in isolation. The concept–method–theory balance is better envisioned as a meshwork of interdependent relationships, as shown on the right side
of Figure 3.1. Historical ecology, with its ‘conceptual toolbox’, is one such
meshwork.
2.2.1 Some conceptual tools
In what follows, we discuss a few of the tools in this conceptual toolbox. This list is
by no means exhaustive and none of these tools exists in isolation. Rather,
considerable interconnection exists among the concepts employed by historical
ecology.
Complex adaptive systems
While historical ecology was elaborating a coherent framework, complexity
science was developing its own. Complexity science is the transdisciplinary
study of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Complex adaptive systems are dynamic,
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non-linear systems that are not in equilibrium and do not act predictably. These
key features distinguish contemporary complex systems thinking from earlier
systems theory, which generally assumed that ‘natural’ systems could be modelled
with a few key variables and would return to equilibrium after being disturbed.
Complexity thinking abandons earlier assumptions, especially in ecology, about
equilibrium states and bounded systems (e.g. ecosystems).
The exploration of CAS has resulted in the creation/recognition of several new
processes and phenomena. The CAS concept thus represents a highly practical
‘multi-tool’ in the historical ecologist’s toolbox. For example, the study of CAS has
revealed that unanticipated interactions among a multitude of diverse elements at
many temporal and spatial scales can produce novel features within a system. This
production of novelty is termed emergence. Further, communication (i.e. information sharing among elements, a characteristic of networks) and system history/
initial conditions have considerable effects on the behaviour of dynamic systems
and on the features that emerge within them. These characteristics of CAS—
emergence, communication, and sensitivity to system history/initial conditions—
correspond with key features of social systems as traditionally recognized, for
example: creativity and innovation (emergence); empirical knowledge-sharing
through language, writing, and education (communication); and the formative
power of traditions, structures and materials, strategies, and habits of mind
(system history/initial conditions).
The insights that accompany the CAS concept are as appropriate to biophysical
systems as they are to social systems. They are particularly well suited to the study
of heterogeneous complex systems—networks that incorporate physical,
biological, and social elements—like those studied by historical ecology. The
largest such complex system that we know is our planet and it has any number
of facets with both human and biophysical components, such as anthropogenic
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climate change, the efficacy of institutions (e.g. hospitals, cities, governments),
and global human health. As awareness grows of the human role in global
environmental change and the future impacts of these changes on humans,
complex-systems thinking will be an important tool that allows critical intraand transdisciplinary collaboration by means of a common vocabulary (Newell
et al. 2005). Discourse within and about CAS holds the promise of closing the
distance between what C. P. Snow (1959) called the ‘Two Cultures’: the biophysical sciences and the social sciences/humanities. In this, complexity science and
CAS not only provide useful conceptual tools to historical ecology, they also share
a common set of goals and challenges.
Resilience
The concept of adaptation, meaning the accommodating response of humans
to environmental conditions, was widely adopted by archaeologists and cultural
ecologists beginning in the 1950s. It has come under considerable—and justified—
criticism in recent years, primarily because it attributes a largely passive role to
humans. Since human activities are central to contemporary global environmental
change, this relationship must be seen as reciprocal. For a growing number of
researchers, adaptation has been replaced by another concept, resilience, with a
focus on the characteristics of human systems that do not degrade critical
resources. The new Stockholm Resilience Centre is a world leader in applying
the concept of resilience to the study of socio-ecological systems, using conceptual
frameworks adapted from complexity science (Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003).
Historical ecology offers a pragmatic means of using the past as a laboratory for
the study of resilience (cf. Redman 2005).
Diversity, region, and scale
Understanding resilience involves exploring a suite of interrelated concepts that
includes diversity, region, and scale. Diversity is the variation of elements within a
system. ‘Biodiversity’ is the number of species within a given biome. Similarly,
‘ecological diversity’ is the variety of biological communities or ecosystems in a
given area. Both kinds of diversity measure the health of biological systems.
Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of diversity as our everyday practice
involves identifying similarity and difference across space and/or through time.
The concept of region is intimately linked to diversity. Regions may be biophysical (e.g. river valleys, climate regimes), historical/sociopolitical (e.g. Burgundy as a political entity), and/or analytical (e.g. a project’s ‘study area’). Noting
the geographic distribution of material cultural diversity, archaeologists have
deployed diverse theories (e.g. peer–polity interactions, interaction spheres) and
methods (e.g. plotting Thiessen polygons) to identify meaningful social ‘regions’
in the past. Critical to an archaeologist’s understanding of such regions is the
knowledge that over time some grow, others shrink, and some seem to disappear
completely. For example, scholars of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages have
often discussed relatively clear distinctions between the Hallstatt ‘provinces’ or
‘zones’ of Western and Central Europe (Arnold 1995; Déchelette 1927; Wells
1980). By the later (i.e. La Tène) Iron Age, the material record appears to show a
coalescence of these earlier regions with a concomitant reduction in diversity—a
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phenomenon that allowed early proponents of European unification to laud the
Celts as the ‘first Europeans’ (Crumley 1991; Dietler 1994, 1998).
Another example highlights the degree to which regions expand and contract
through time. Founded in the mid-fifth century ad, the polity of Burgundy has
undergone numerous changes in size and shape. At its largest, the region encompassed the Low Countries and exercised political influence as far east as
Austria. By comparison, the Burgundy that we study today appears ‘domesticated’. It remains a centre of agricultural production, but one that has been
fractured and entirely enveloped by France. It is much smaller and far less
politically influential than in times past.
It is not only sociopolitical regions that ‘breathe’. Biophysical regions also
expand and contract. In a 1993 article, Crumley examined environmental proxy
data to trace the movements of Europe’s three major climatic regimes—Atlantic,
Continental, and Mediterranean—over two millennia. As shown in Figure 3.2, she
found that the ecotones between these three regimes varied markedly throughout
the period. A warm, stable period, the so-called ‘Roman Climate Optimum
(RCO)’, began at about 300 bc and lasted until around 300 ad. In an ideal
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demonstration of the intimate connection between climate and human activity,
the RCO likely pushed prime agricultural land as far north as the Baltic Coast and
the shores of Britain. Not surprisingly, this is the period of Roman expansion out
of the Mediterranean Basin. When cooler and more variable weather returned to
dominance after 300 ad, the Romans in the Western Empire fell back southward,
making way for (or being pushed by) populations whose means of production
were better suited to the cooler, more temperate Atlantic and Continental regimes. Clearly the breathing of biophysical regions has an impact on the size and
shape of sociopolitical regions. Recent realizations about the human role in
producing global climate change make it clear that the opposite also holds true.
As Edith Pielou reminded us several decades ago (1975), scale defines diversity.
We must think of scale both in terms of how systems organize themselves and in
terms of how we, in turn, study them. Scale—spatio-temporal, economic, social,
and/or political—is of central importance to the archaeologist. It is in addressing
this issue that archaeologists describe diversity in the past. If we choose the wrong
analytic scale, we may miss critical evidence of similarity or difference. The same
is true if we fail to recognize that systems organize themselves at multiple scales
which may differ from one another and which may change. Thus, as with regions
that breathe, we must be able to work across changing analytic and systemic
scales.
Risk and vulnerability
If the archaeologist’s job is to characterize practices and their distribution in time
and space, historical ecologists ask the paired ‘next questions’: what practices led
to change in the system, and what system changes led to changes in practice? One
way of thinking about how and why the geographic distribution of diversity
changes over time is to pose questions of change in terms of risk and vulnerability.
Risk is uncertainty about possible undesirable outcomes, and concerns everyone
equally; for example, climate change puts all farmers at risk. Vulnerability is the
set of circumstances and conditions that increase negative impact for some groups
or individuals; for example, if we accept that diversity increases systemic resilience, less-diverse farms and regions are more vulnerable to climate change.
But what might an archaeologist do with the concepts of risk and vulnerability? A
relatively obvious way of incorporating these concepts might be to view past economic and/or geographic shifts as responses to risk. Such shifts may also evidence
how societies overcame or yielded to vulnerability. This understanding is certainly
implicit in our discussion of ecotonal and attendant cultural movements above, where
different patterns of exploitation seem to have allowed the expansion of particular
socio-political regions at different times and under specific climatic conditions.1
Vulnerability in archaeological contexts is the focus of recent ‘Collapse’ literature
(Gunn et al. 2004), including geographer Jared Diamond’s (2005) popular book
1
Our characterization in this example is intentionally materialist and evolutionary. Unlike most
neo-evolutionary approaches in archaeology, however, historical ecology attempts to look at a broader
range of potential selection pressures, adaptive strategies, and the dialectic between these pressures and
strategies. For example, historical ecologists recognize that a practice adopted to mitigate risk may, in
fact, have devastating environmental effects. Further, historical ecology is not committed to the notions
of ‘progress’ that bedevil most neo-evolutionary approaches (Yoffee 2005).
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of the same name. It is important to remember that while systems of exploitation
and/or governance may collapse in response to ecological vulnerability, the people
embedded in these systems do not necessarily perish. For example, despite the
famous ‘Maya Collapse’ of the eighth to ninth centuries ad, communities of living
Maya exist throughout Central America today.2 That populations might be more
ecologically resilient than the systems they design is a fact often overlooked by
Diamond and other similar authors (see McAnany and Gallareta Negrón 2009).
Scholars who wish to investigate risk and vulnerability must keep this complexity
in mind.
Change and causation
In order to understand change in the past, the traditional approach has been to
establish a temporally ordered chain of events, termed causation, which allows
generalization about the system. But because complex systems are comprised of
properties that can change at various temporal and spatial scales and can interact
in unanticipated ways, the usual temporal ordering of events cannot describe
‘causal’ interactions among variables. This need not mean that we are doomed to
repeat every mistake in human history; instead, it requires a meta-theoretical
approach that takes into account the properties of dynamical systems that include
humans.
Transformational events in complex systems (thresholds) are particularly important; while a clear line of temporal causation is compromised, it is possible to
analyse profound changes in the nature of the system (termed a regime shift) by
identifying the variables that concatenate to ‘cause’ the change. This is what the
French Annales school of history calls conjuncture (‘situation’ or ‘circumstance’): a
particular concatenation of conditions and events, some of which are foreseeable
and some not. In complex-systems terms, these are tipping points that move the
system from one state to another.
Physical scientists have long been familiar with this notion of tipping points.
Figure 3.3 shows a standard phase transition diagram for water, as it transforms
from solid, to liquid, to gas. Fundamental to our discussion of tipping points are
the melting and boiling points, fairly brief but crucial moments in phase transition
where changes to the overall nature of the system might actually be observed.
It may be difficult to understand how this way of conceptualizing physicalchemical systems relates to archaeological examples. Social scientists are, however,
quite adept at detecting systemic change in the past. Our ‘phase diagrams’ may
look different but, as shown at the bottom of Figure 3.3, we should recognize
tipping points as those moments at which new styles, types, phases, and/or
cultures emerge. In studying such moments, we often search for the quick-acting
(i.e. ‘rapid’) variable that provided the impetus for the transition: the contagious
plant disease that rendered a society unable to feed itself, the assassin with a gun
2
We do not wish to suggest that these people are some kind of living relic of the past, preserving
their ancestors’ ‘pre-Collapse’ identities. Rather—recognizing that human populations may survive
dramatic climatic and cultural shifts, even when archaeological evidence seems to suggest otherwise—
these are contemporary global citizens who have a complex biological and social relationship to the
Classic Maya.
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Figure 3.3. Tipping points in the phase transitions of water (top) and in archaeology
(bottom).
that sparked a World War, or the pair of Atlantic hurricanes that left a disproportionate number of minority families sick and homeless in a large city.
But rapid variables are only the most recent arrivals in a series of rapid, not-sorapid, and slow variables within these systems. The plant disease causes system
collapse only after agricultural lands have become salinated over the course of
decades and after local populations have made the decision to specialize in a
limited number of plant crops. The assassin’s bullet only sparks the First World
War after the imperial powers of the West have spent centuries building up their
militaries, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ethnicity policy and divided rule have
created generations of animosity between the rulers and the ruled, and after the
empire has suffered humiliation in a series of failed revolutions/civil wars.
The disproportionate devastation wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
on the African-American families of New Orleans is made possible only after
centuries of racial inequality, decades of human-enhanced climate change, and
years of inattention to the city’s flood-control infrastructure. Clearly we cannot
understand systemic change by focusing on rapid variables and tipping points
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alone. Physicists need to study the changes in density undergone by ice, water,
and steam precisely when they appear to be stable and unchanged. Similarly,
archaeologists—with our close attention to scales of time and space—are perfectly
poised to study not only rapid variables, but also the slower, less detectable
variables which operate during periods of seeming system stability. Historical
ecology enables archaeologists to study such periods of apparent inertia, encouraging us to seek evidence of slow variables in regional and local contexts as well as
in other disciplines (e.g. environmental science, botany, geology).
Agency
Any discussion of causation in the systems of which humans are a part necessarily
leads to a conversation about agency. A concern with agency in Western social
theory can be traced back at least as far as Marx (e.g. 1978 [1852]), Durkheim (e.g.
1982 [1895], 1995 [1912]), and Weber (e.g. 1978 [1922]), and is in fact significantly older (Dobres and Robb 2000a). The last three decades have seen a revival
of agency thinking throughout the social sciences, largely in response to the work
of practice theorists Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1979; 1984).
The contributors to the 2000 edited volume Agency in Archaeology (Dobres and
Robb 2000b) addressed issues of definition, intentionality, scale, temporality,
material culture, politics, ethnocentrism, and the practice of archaeology itself to
demonstrate the significant potential of agent-centred perspectives in archaeology. With few exceptions, these authors focused on the agency of human actors,
generally in relation to other humans or collections thereof. Where artefacts were
discussed, they were most often tools used by one group of people to intervene in
the lives of others. Thus, these essays exhibited a conception of artefacts as
relatively well-behaved ‘intermediaries’ (sensu Latour 1999) between humans—
or, at the outside, between humans and their environments—recalling the work of
Appadurai (1986), Kopytoff (1986), and others back to Malinowski (1920, 1922),
Boas (1887, 1901), and Tylor (1920 [1871]).
In his contribution to Agency in Archaeology, Martin Wobst (2000) took a
different approach to the study of agency, admitting that non-human things
might interfere in the world in ways not intended by their human creators and
that different kinds of objects might exist ‘in reference, in tension, and in tune
with one another’ (Wobst 2000: 46). While some archaeologists had long-since
expressed a willingness to ascribe some agency to objects (e.g. Clarke 1978),
Wobst opened the door for a different kind of agency discussion: one in which
non-humans had their own agency and social relationships which were qualitatively similar—differing in kind, not degree—to those of humans. This insight was
in line with discussions of non-human agency and its role in human society
outside of archaeology, particularly in studies of science and technology (STS)
(e.g. Haraway 1991; Pickering 1995, 1997). Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has
come to be the branch of STS most often associated with such discussions and
Bruno Latour has been one of the most prolific architects of this perspective.
Latour describes human society as a complex, interactive, and iterative collective
of human and non-human actors; no effective ‘science of the social’ can exist that
is not all at once a science of both humans and non-humans (Latour 2005).
Further, Latour’s non-human actors are not all well-behaved and passive. Rather,
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like Wobst, he notes that objects are often ‘mediators’ that produce effects
unforeseen by the humans who use them, an emergence that he has referred to
as the ‘slight surprise of action’ (Latour 1999: 266).3
In the past decade, a few archaeologists have passed through the door opened
by Wobst and others like him. For example, in a cleverly titled article, Chris
Gosden (2005) drew on the artefact-focused theories of Clarke (1978) and Gell
(1998) to explore the effects that a changing suite of material objects imposed on
the lives of Britons as a result of Britain’s incorporation into the Roman Empire.
Others have drawn on the work of Latour and his interlocutors. Andrew Martin
(2005) attempted to use Latour’s Actor-Network Theory to understand the
diversity of Illinois valley Hopewell burial mounds as the material output of
particular controversies within the community (or communities) that built
them. A more compelling use of Latour has been provided by Peter Whitridge
(2004), who traced the profound renegotiation of social scripts engendered by a
series of seemingly minor alterations to Inuit harpoon technology.
Given that archaeology’s closest sister-disciplines—anthropology and history—
have recently rediscovered a theoretical interest in materiality and material culture
(e.g. Lubar and Kingery 1993; Miller 2005), studies like those mentioned above
would seem to indicate a fruitful conceptual path for archaeology over the
next generation (cf. Meskell 2005b, 2005a; Olsen 2003, 2007). If in thinking
about non-human ‘objects’ we turn from thinking about artefacts to considering
the environment, such studies certainly provide models for exploring the
complex ecological collectives/systems of which humans continue to be a part
(cf. Ingold 2000).
Heterarchy
It is important to note that we are emphatically not advocating the return of
environmental determinism from archaeology’s past. Humans are not behavioural automatons that respond to the determining stimuli of their environments; nor do they alter the non-human world with impunity or omnipotence.
Agency in ecological collectives/systems must be understood as distributed across
the human and non-human actors in these systems. All elements ‘act’ (cf. Wobst
2000) in relation to the actions of others. Thus, such systems have no overarching
hierarchy of dominant/determining ‘stimulators’ and subordinate ‘responders’.
Rather, they are complex heterarchies of interacting elements that may sometimes
stimulate and at other times respond; that may sometimes dominate the system
and at other times may be dominated.
As Crumley has written in the International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences (Crumley 2007a: 468), one of the most promising developments of
complex systems research is the concept of heterarchy, ‘which treats the
diversity of relationships among system elements and offers a way to think
about systemic change in spatial, temporal, and cognitive dimensions’. Originally developed to describe the topology of nervous nets (McCulloch 1945),
definitions of heterarchy are remarkably consistent across a vast array of
3
With its emphases on the heterogeneity of system elements, the importance of relationships and
interactions between those elements, and the distribution of agency across them, we see ANT as a
logical extension of CAS.
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disciplines including artificial intelligence and computer design (Minsky and
Papert 1972), mathematics (Hofstadter 1979), and sociology (Stark 2001). Since
the mid-1970s, Crumley has used the term in her anthropological and archaeological work to refer to systems whose elements are unranked, or possess the
potential for being ranked in a number of different ways, depending on
systemic requirements (Crumley 1979: 144). Heterarchies stand in contrast to
hierarchies, but do not replace them; rather the two exist in dialectical relationship with one another. Heterarchy is a corrective to the naturalized characterization of power relations, which conflates hierarchy with order (Crumley
1987; Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995). Recently, the disproportionate
attention placed on certain groups in the archaeological record has been called
into question. For example, in critical essays concerning the disproportionate
visibility of ‘chiefs’ (Collis, Ch. 9 this volume) and men (Pope and Ralston, Ch.
17 this volume), participants at the Durham conference called for interpretations of the Bronze and Iron Age past that took account of social heterarchies
as well as hierarchies. This call was perhaps most poignantly issued by J. D.
Hill, who poses the question: ‘If I ask you to describe later prehistoric societies,
do you have to picture them as triangles?’ (Hill, Ch. 10 this volume).
It is important to remember that historical ecology extends the concept of
heterarchy not only to the material being studied but also to the manner of that
study. As a transdisciplinary endeavour, historical ecology recognizes the contribution of many different ‘kinds’ of researcher and ‘types’ of data. Correlating the
contributions of these researchers and integrating their data represent two of
the biggest challenges of an historical ecological approach but also account for the
richness of the understandings yielded.
3 EM P L O Y I N G T H E T O O L S O F HI S T O R I C A L E C OL OG Y:
AT L A N TI C EU R O P E I N TH E F IR S T M IL L E NN IU M BC
A number of case studies in historical ecology demonstrate the utility and
application of these and other conceptual tools (e.g. Balée and Erickson 2006;
Bauer 2003; Cormier 2003; Lentz 2000; Rival 2002). We do not seek here to
provide another such case study. Rather, we wish to provide a guideline for how a
research team might organize this kind of project (recognizing that useful information about research design and implementation is often ‘black-boxed’ in moretraditional case studies). Accordingly, we present a historical ecology research
design to: (1) trace the role of global and local environmental change as a driver of
cultural change in Atlantic Europe during the first millennium bc, and (2)
determine the possibility that this cultural change in turn drove further environmental change. While we hope that the next generation of archaeological research
will incorporate historical ecology at such broad spatio-temporal scales, we have
attempted here to present a ‘scalable’ guideline, equally appropriate for projects
that examine finer scales of time and space.
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3.1 Questions of scale
At the outset, two questions of scale need to be addressed. The first is a question of
spatial scale. While archaeologists are quite effective in dealing with large time
intervals, we tend to be less comfortable thinking across expanses of space, like
across the whole of Atlantic Europe. Consider, for example, the pains taken to
convince archaeologists to work at the landscape or regional scale rather than on
single sites (e.g. Binford 1983; Crumley and Marquardt 1990; Dunnell 1992;
Dunnell and Dancey 1983; Foley 1981; Marquardt and Crumley 1987; Schiffer
1972, 1976, 1983; Stafford and Hajic 1992; Thomas 1975; Zvelebil, Green, and
Macklin 1992). What we propose here is a similar shift, from the landscape/
regional scale to that of the macro-region. While daunting, we are convinced that
in-depth analyses—not summary treatments—on the macro-regional scale represent the future of archaeology. Such analyses are made possible by recent advances
in communications (e.g. email, videoconferencing) and data management/
analysis (e.g. geographic information systems: GIS) technologies. Operational
models for this kind of study might be found in fledgling international projects
that explore the relationship between society and global climate change, like the
Integrated History of People on Earth (IHOPE) project.
The second question that must be addressed involves the human scale of this
study. No matter how broadly trained or experienced, there is no way that a lone
scholar or small team could complete this kind of research. As we have noted,
historical ecology is a transdisciplinary approach. Archaeologists are generally
familiar with collaborative projects and recognize that one of the most effective
ways to do transdisciplinary work is by enrolling specialists from a number of
disciplines into a single heterarchical research team. Realizing a project of the
magnitude that we propose here requires a similarly broad enrolment.
3.2 Operational principles
A set of operational principles (in addition to the conceptual tools outlined above)
guide our research design. These principles include:
a commitment to begin with a research design constructed by all collaborating scholars and evaluated/supported by relevant stakeholders4 who jointly
decide central questions, elucidate desired outcomes, and plan the datagathering, data-merging, and interpretive phases of the project
a commitment to work with both quantitative and qualitative empirical data
a commitment to integrate empirical knowledge (both academic and nonacademic) in a fashion which privileges neither and attempts to translate
each to the other
a commitment to employ data collected using ‘best practice’ protocols for
each relevant discipline
4
‘Stakeholders’ include representatives of the non-academic community who actually live in the
area to be studied.
Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide
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a willingness to keep independent from one another these various lines of
evidence until such time as discipline-based data gathering is complete, but
also to keep researchers themselves in constant dialogue
a willingness to see conclusions about the history of a region constantly
modified or reversed by new, evidence-based interpretation
a recognition that shifts of knowledge about a region tend to have historical,
material effects in the region
a recognition that evidential gaps (both spatial and temporal) raise questions
about the extent of extrapolation, leading to questions of scale and reliability
a recognition that designers’ decisions about temporal and spatial parameters must be tied both to desired outcomes and to available information
a recognition that ‘baselines’ are very important and have the potential to
introduce errors into later interpretations.
These principles underlie any well-designed historical ecological inquiry and are
fundamental to considerations of data types/sources, methods of integrating these
data, and approaches to interpreting them once correlated.
3.3 Data types
Copious data exist which, taken together, could shed light upon the mutuo-causal
relationship(s) between climate change and human activity during the first millennium bc. These data come in a number of forms, derive from several sources,
and describe varying spatio-temporal scales. They have been generated by experts
from a number of backgrounds, all of whom should be consulted as stakeholders
in our project. In bringing stakeholders together, new categories of pertinent
information emerge in addition to those that we outline below.
3.3.1 Biophysical data
An essential class of data to be integrated into our project are biophysical and
palaeoclimatological data; proxies that have traditionally been collected by experts
in the earth sciences, zoology, and botany. Although such data have generally been
considered ‘natural’, many now recognize a significant and long-term human
influence on what is ‘natural’ (see e.g. Raffles 2002). At the very least, these data
describe the changing stage upon which human action took place in the past.
The biophysical and palaeoclimatological data that we seek to use—like all of the
data that we examine—include both qualitative and quantitative information and
describe a number of different spatial and temporal scales. Some examples are:
geomorphologic data (including bedrock geology, soils, topography, and
water regime/hydrology)
ice cores
palaeontology (i.e. evidence of past plant and animal communities)
pollen and phytolith cores
dendrochronology.
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3.3.2 Anthropogenic data
Complementing these ‘natural’ data is a group of human-related data. These
anthropogenic data often derive from two distinct disciplinary domains: archaeology and ethnohistory. Critical to a historical ecological perspective is the realization that these domains are not separate; that people dwell in the landscapes
designed by earlier populations, modifying them to suit their own needs (see e.g.
Bender 1998, 2002; Bradley 2002; Bradley and Williams 1998). The ‘archaeological’ and the ‘ethnohistoric’ impact one another constantly and it is impossible to
consider one without the other. While we can focus our attention on a particular
period, we cannot completely bracket out earlier or later periods from our work.
Archaeological data that we seek to use include:
bioanthropological data (across various spatial and temporal scales, at the
level of the individual, the family, the household, and/or the population)
palaeodietary data
landscape (i.e. ‘built’ environment) data
household data
technological/artefactual data
archaeometric data.
We complement these archaeological data with several kinds of ethnohistoric
data, including:
geopolitical data
land-use data
trauma data
‘fictional’/folkloric data (e.g. barrows as faerie ‘sidhes’)5
historic excavation data.
Important to these ethnohistoric data is the contribution of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK). As several archaeologists have demonstrated (e.g.
Bender 1998; Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007; Schmidt 1994), the current
occupants of the landscapes that we study have their own encounters, experiences,
interpretations, and interests that should not be overlooked.
3.4 Integrating and interpreting the data
The types and sources of data suggested above are perhaps not surprising, given
that archaeologists typically employ most of them. What may be surprising are the
spatial and temporal scales that we seek to cover. Once all of these data are
amassed, a research team is left with the Herculean task of integrating them
into a coherent model of human–land interaction over vast expanses of space
and time.
5
People’s ‘abstract’ beliefs about a landscape generally impact their material practice on/within that
landscape.
Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide
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The spatial extent we propose here becomes especially problematic to the
process of producing such a model, as it means enrolling expertise not only
from diverse disciplines, but also from a number of nations. Silvia Tomášková
(1995, 2005) has shown that even within the single discipline of archaeology,
researchers from different national traditions working with the same material
might produce markedly different interpretations of that material. Clearly, our
project necessitates sustained efforts at translation, both among disciplines and
within them. As Meyer has suggested elsewhere (2004), translation within a
discipline not only involves converting text from one language to another; but
also communicating the assumptions and processes that underlay the production
of knowledge in one place to colleagues working in another.
3.4.1 Project organization and sequence
We suggest two important measures might facilitate the processes of translation
and data integration. The first is the adoption of an organizational plan containing
workgroups focusing on single types of data (e.g. soils, technological change)
nested within broader clusters of closely related disciplines (e.g. biophysical,
anthropogenic). The workgroups should not be seen as isolated entities, however,
and should be encouraged to consult with one another and/or share members.
Similarly, the clusters should seek to integrate the research of the workgroups that
comprise them, but should also maintain constant dialogue with other clusters.
This organizational plan is illustrative of how heterarchical and hierarchical
management structures can operate simultaneously within a system.
The second measure we suggest is a multi-phased approach to project planning
and execution. These phases refer to discrete planning and integration periods
systematically undertaken by stakeholders at different organizational levels. We
suggest that a basic project ‘cycle’ consists of five sequential phases.
Phase I: Advanced planning (all stakeholders)
As suggested above, project planning should involve all stakeholders (i.e. academics and non-academics alike). With a clear understanding of the data available, stakeholders should reconsider their goals and desired outcomes for the
main project (including what constitute ‘deliverables’ for the project). Stakeholders have to decide whether proposed lines of evidence are adequate to address
the questions of interest. If not, they have to decide how to either reorient the
project or obtain any data that may be lacking.
Early in the data-integration process, stakeholders should also consider how to
ensure that the individual research units (i.e. the clusters and workgroups) are
producing information which is easily comparable among units. Ideally, these
choices would have been made before beginning the process of data collection, but
since a project like this relies on nearly a century of previously collected data, this
kind of advanced planning is out of the question. By addressing a few concerns as
early in the data integration process as possible, researchers can avoid significant
obstacles to correlation later on.
Different disciplines employ different spatial units, related to the
spatial extent studied by the discipline, developments in its history, and the
S PAT I A L U N I T S .
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geographic location of the practitioner. The near-universal adoption of the metric
system as the standard for scientific research helps us to avoid conflicts between
researchers, but it is still true that atmospheric scientists, for example, work in
kilometres while archaeologists continue to discuss centimetres. Stakeholders
must consider the range of units employed by their disciplines and select a
standard (or modular standards) that maintains fine-grained data resolution
while reducing the amount of data redundancy. The latter is of particular concern
for a project like ours where large spatial expanses are being discussed.
The historical ecologist is confronted with similar problems
in terms of time. Some of the variables that we study are slow (e.g. the salination of
agricultural soils), while others are rapid (e.g. locust swarms). Similarly, some of
the data that we propose to use provide very clear year-to-year resolution (e.g.
dendrochronology ice-cores), while others provide resolution in decades or centuries (e.g. radiocarbon dating). As with space, stakeholders must choose a
temporal standard that strikes a balance between resolution and redundancy.
TEMPORAL UNITS.
Given the variety of data employed in this project, it is
unclear whether stakeholders would arrive at ‘apples to apples’ comparisons even
with standard spatial and temporal units. A way forward may be to recognize that
each discipline is called upon to describe not only the geographic distributions of
various phenomena at certain times, but also change in these distributions over
time. A series of uniform ‘change indices’ would facilitate comparisons between
the otherwise diverse data of the various disciplines.
INDICES OF CHANGE.
‘ H O L E S ’ I N T H E DATA . ‘Holes’ exist in nearly every data set. As archaeologists, we
are particularly familiar with the presence of holes in our data; of regions where
settlement seems to have been avoided or periods of time for which we have no
artefactual record. Stakeholders have to decide what to do about such lacunae. Do
areas and/or periods with no data get excluded from analysis? Are they designated
as priorities for further data collection? Will data interpolated from known areas/
periods suffice? Each of these solutions presents its own problems: exclusion
impacts the spatial and temporal resolution of the data left to work with, further
data collection takes time and resources, and interpolation might introduce
serious error into the data. Stakeholders should weigh each of these options
carefully before deciding as a group which approach allows them to most effectively meet their research goals.
Phase II: Advanced planning (research clusters)
Similar advanced planning should be carried out by the research clusters. As with
the broader group, this planning should include discussions and consensus about
cluster-specific goals for the project, outcomes, and deliverables. This would be
the forum in which to discuss specific problems of comparison that might be
somewhat esoteric to the broader group.
Phase III: Planning and analysis (disciplinary workgroups)
Advanced planning should also be undertaken at the workgroup level. Discussions here should include an elaboration of each discipline’s ‘best practice’ protocols. This is the forum in which the kinds of intra-disciplinary translation
Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide
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already mentioned would prove most important. Once a set of protocols is
decided upon by the workgroup, researchers should be allowed to apply those
protocols to the data. By the end of this phase, each workgroup should produce a
diachronic, discipline-specific model or narrative of Earth-system change.
Phase IV: Model integration (research clusters)
These models/narratives should then be brought together with those of closely
related disciplines at the cluster level. The goals of this first stage of transdisciplinary data integration might be to produce one model of Earth-system change
per cluster. Working with such models, researchers can begin to look for places
where and/or periods when change seems to be coeval across proxies. They can
also look for instances where change in one variable seems to ‘lead’ to change in
another or to ‘lag’ behind another. Importantly, such models allow researchers to
identify moments when change seems to happen suddenly and without apparent
cause. All of these observations together allow researchers to develop narratives of
systemic change within their clusters.
Phase V: Model integration (all stakeholders)
Just as the second phase of research closely mirrors the first phase, the final phase
that we propose closely mirrors the previous phase. In this stage, we suggest that
the cluster models be brought together into an integrated model of Earth-system
change. Here, again, researchers should look for coeval, leading, and lagging
changes across proxies and domains. The degree to which seemingly random or
unexplained changes from the cluster models find explanations at this level of
integration should be noted, highlighting the mutuo-causal relationship between
humans and their environment.
We wish to make two things clear about this ‘final’ phase of our proposed
historical ecological research. The first is that—like all scientific inquiry—historical
ecological research is ongoing. Thus, while it might appear to be the final step in a
research endeavour, Phase V would likely be the point at which new questions
were asked and new explanations sought, taking stakeholders back to their clusters
and disciplines and following our phased plan through an indefinite series of
iterations.
The second point involves the role of qualitative information in the process of
data integration. A reliance on quantitative data (or on qualitative data that might
be quantified) has been implicit in much of our project outline up to this point. At
the integration phases, however, qualitative data—particularly TEK—may prove
invaluable in explaining many of the observed patterns of change. ‘Final’ model
in hand, stakeholders are charged with identifying parsimonious explanations
for change from within their qualitative data and/or their own experiences.
Given this, qualitative data are essential to the production of integrated models/
narratives of socio-natural change in any region and/or for any time period.
3.4.2 GIS: A tool for data integration
Few people would have suggested a project of this magnitude in the past because it
would have been impossible to realize. Indeed, how can a team integrate so much
diverse data into a single model? With the rapid development and wide
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distribution of powerful communications and data management/analysis technologies over the past twenty-five years, projects like this have become possible.
Important among these technologies is a suite of database and mapping tools
referred to as geographic information systems (GIS).
While many of us have come to think of GIS as a set of advanced computer
applications, it must be remembered that GIS have been around since humans
started drawing and communicating with maps. Given that archaeologists have
been collecting and analysing spatial data since the early days of the discipline, the
tie between archaeology and GIS would seem to be long-standing. Fundamental
work in establishing the discipline (e.g. that of Pitt-Rivers in south-eastern
England or of Thomsen and Worsaae in Denmark) relied on the detailed collection of horizontal and vertical spatial data, the close analysis of artefact attributes,
and the careful integration of these two kinds of data—locational/spatial and
attribute—in what might be considered ‘analogue’ GIS. In the century and a
half that separates Thomsen and Worsaae’s first excavations from our own, GIS
applications in archaeology have become ‘digital’, sophisticated, and widespread
(e.g. Allen, Green, and Zubrow 1990; Conolly and Lake 2006; Llobera 1996;
Madry 1987; Wheatley and Gillings 2002).
One of the many benefits of digital GIS applications is the ability to integrate
very diverse data into a single analytical framework while maintaining the integrity of the initial data. This is done largely through the management of data layers:
individual data sets projected at the same geographic scale and superimposed
upon one another. In this way, a researcher can quickly obtain diverse information about any identified location, as suggested by Figure 3.4. Layers can also be
correlated through various calculating functions to produce new layers of aggregated data. It is this later capability that makes GIS ideal for historical ecology. For
example, our French Project GIS is currently made up of more than 150 layers.
These layers include topography, hydrology, contemporary and historic land use,
archaeological sites of various periods, and a number of calculated layers, all
collected/assembled over the course of thirty years.
Archaeologists on both sides of the Atlantic have become familiar with GISproduced maps. We often see so-called ‘vector’ maps (i.e. maps made up of points,
lines, and polygons) which show site distributions or theoretical boundaries
between hierarchically organized polities (e.g. Nouvel, Ch. 8 this volume; Sande
Lemos et al., Ch. 7 this volume). We also see ‘raster’ maps, as on the right side of
Figure 3.4. Raster maps might be described as ‘pixilated’ or ‘tessellated’. They are
made up of a uniform grid of cells, each of which contains a discrete value. The
raster concept is fairly simple, but very powerful. A simple raster showing the
presence or absence of some feature (e.g. water, Attic pottery, burned earth) might
have a grid of 1 m 1 m cells with the values 0 and 1. More complex maps may
have more than two values, depending on what question the analyst seeks to
answer. Raster maps have recently come to the attention of archaeologists as the
products of several kinds of analysis (e.g. viewshed analysis: Llobera 2003, 2007).
As shown in Figure 3.4, it is often the case that a single GIS contains both vector
and raster elements. For the research project that we propose, working with
rasters provides the most effective approach to examining the various data and
correlating them with one another. We suggest that workgroups produce single
‘time-slice’ rasters using the uniform spatial, temporal, and ‘hole’ conventions
Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide
GIS map showing archaeological sites in
relation to soils, hydrology, and roads.
129
Vector Map: A map made up of points,
lines, and/or polygons.
Sites
Roads
Hydrology
Soils
Layers: Individual data sets correlated
and superimposed on one another.
Raster Map: A map made up of uniform
cells, each of which contains a discreet
value. Here, values are 0 and 1. The
soils layer at the left is a raster with more
than two values.
Figure 3.4. Some GIS fundamentals.
decided upon by all stakeholders in Phase I. These rasters might then be overlain on
one another and examined for change between time-slices. Change between timeslices could be recorded in a new results layer using the ‘change indices’ also decided
upon in Phase I. The results produced by the individual disciplinary workgroups
(i.e. the change layers) might then be overlain on one another to examine ‘leading’,
‘lagging’, and ‘coeval’ changes between the various human and environmental
variables/proxies through time. The same process could be repeated for the
integrated cluster maps. In this way—with input and output carefully controlled
by a relatively small number of project-wide conventions—GIS makes it possible to
execute the kind of transdisciplinary data integration that we have proposed.
4 C O NC L U S IO N
In this contribution, we have reintroduced historical ecology to an archaeological audience. We have discussed several of the concepts central to this approach
and suggested how historical ecology might be brought to bear on the study of
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Atlantic Europe in the first millennium bc. In relatively broad strokes, we have
sketched out a research plan that would draw on diverse data to understand the
relationship between environmental and cultural change during this period.
While the project we have outlined is massive, we have presented a research
design that might provide a guideline for projects at different geographic and
temporal scales.
In its transdisciplinarity and its simultaneous focus on the environmental and
the social, we expect many archaeological readers to find historical ecology
familiar and enticing. It is likely, however, that some readers continue to wonder
why archaeologists should adopt this approach. In terms of archaeological
theory and practice, we submit that historical ecology continues a trend started
by earlier environmental and landscape approaches. Just as landscape archaeology succeeded in getting archaeologists to work in regions rather than on sites,
historical ecology encourages them to think in spatial terms that are even more
expansive. Further, historical ecology requires archaeologists to think outside of
traditionally accepted period/phase models—the temporal equivalent of the
archaeological site—and to consider human–land interactions and change in
the longue durée.
Perhaps more compelling, historical ecology is one approach to making archaeology relevant again in the eyes of the public. In the current economy, it is often
difficult to demonstrate the value of archaeology to the non-academic world.
Archaeologists at all levels find it difficult to obtain research funding, particularly
when they must compete against scholars in disciplines that study the ‘here and
now’. Cultural resource protections are reduced as the costs of historic preservation are weighed against the benefits of development. Where we work in France,
farmers and loggers struggling to meet the intensified production standards
set by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) must weigh similar choices. It
often seems questionable whether archaeology will survive restructuring of the
academy, of funding organizations, and of legislation.
It is not just a matter of archaeology needing to recast itself in order
to survive in the twenty-first century. The twenty-first-century world needs
archaeology (perhaps now more than ever). Researchers, politicians, and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic are coming to the realization that global
climate change is probably the biggest challenge that our generation will face.
Policymakers look to experts in the life and earth sciences to understand Earthsystemic changes, and to social scientists to develop ‘sustainable’ or ‘resilient’
strategies for coping with and/or braking climate change. Charles Redman
(2005) has suggested that despite a rich intellectual tradition of anthropologists
and archaeologists who study the relationship between humans and their
environment, our colleagues in other sciences and funding agencies have been
remiss in enrolling our expertise in broad-scale environmental research programmes. As a result, most sustainability and resiliency models have been
essentially synchronic, lacking the deep-time perspective that archaeology provides. Historical ecology affirms the relevance of archaeology to these questions,
demonstrating that by mining the knowledge of the past, we might discover
ways to overcome the hardships of the future.
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