Abstract
This paper promotes an explicit study of archaeologies of empire and environment, and advances theories and methods in environmental archaeology that demonstrate that environmental practices articulate people's relationships to imperial authority. While many studies of empire take for granted that centralized organization and surplus production lead to political control and social inequity, in the papers assembled for this special issue, the very relationship between human-environment interactions and political power becomes the object of study. In this introduction, we review established archaeological approaches to empire, explain how environmental frameworks productively recast our understandings of imperialism, and proffer a number of avenues for continued research on the subject, including those provided by the articles in this issue. We present three overarching themes for the study of empire and environment—scale, legacy, and resilience and resistance—and discuss their implementation with the papers that follow. Ultimately, we argue that imperialism entails the management of heterogeneous peoples and environments, and therefore, archaeologies of empire require the integrated study of humans, landscapes, and biota.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 87-102 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of Anthropological Archaeology |
| Volume | 52 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2018 |
Funding
This special issue springs from an SAA session of the same name that we co-organized and chaired in April 2017 in Vancouver, BC. We thank the Archeology Division of the American Anthropological Association for sponsoring this session and helping to raise the profile of this research topic in archaeology. We are extremely grateful to our contributors; we challenged them to think creatively and sometimes differently about their projects in order to address the themes of the issue, and they rose to the occasion admirably. There were several participants in the SAA session who were unable to take part in this issue that we would like to acknowledge and thank: Allison Bain, Karis Baker, Christine Hastorf, Holly Miller, Matthew Pawlowicz, Mélanie Rousseau, Krish Seetah, Jack Stoetzel, Naomi Sykes, Bethany Walker, and Sarah Walshaw. We encourage readers to seek out the works of these scholars, as they too are shaping the study of empire and environment. This introductory article was improved greatly by the thoughtful and critical feedback of two anonymous reviewers, and we are grateful for their efforts. Finally, we thank JAA's co-editor, Anne Katzenberg, for guiding this special issue to publication with a steady hand.
Keywords
- Agriculture
- Empire
- Environmental archaeology
- Landscape
- Legacy effects
- Political ecology
- Political economy
- Resilience
- Resistance
- Scale
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Human Factors and Ergonomics
- Archaeology
- History
- Archaeology