Historical Ecologies, Heterarchies and Transtemporal Landscapes

Interlacing varied approaches within Historical Ecology, this volume offers new routes to researching and understanding human–environmental interactions and the heterarchical power relations that shape both socioecological change and resilience over time. Historical Ecology draws from archaeology, archival research, ethnography, the humanities and the biophysical sciences to merge the history of the Earth’s biophysical system with the history of humanity.

Considering landscape as the spatial manifestation of the relations between humans and their environments through time, the authors in this volume examine the multi-directional power dynamics that have shaped settlement, agrarian, monumental and ritual landscapes through the long-term field projects they have pursued around the globe.

Examining both biocultural stability and change through the longue durée in different regions, these essays highlight intersectionality and counterpoised power flows to demonstrate that alongside and in spite of hierarchical ideologies, the daily life of power is heterarchical. Knowledge of transtemporal human–environmental relationships is necessary for strategizing socioecological resilience. Historical Ecology shows how the past can be useful to the future.

Celeste Ray is Professor of Environmental Arts and Humanities and Anthropology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of The Origins of Ireland’s Holy Wells and Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South, and is the editor of volumes considering Scottish identities or Southern Culture, including Transatlantic Scots, Southern Heritage on Display and Ethnicity (Volume Six of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture).

Manuel Fernández-Götz is Reader in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize. He has authored more than 150 publications on Iron Age societies and the Roman conquest, including the monographs Identity and Power: The Transformation of Iron Age Societies in Northeast Gaul (2014), and the edited volumes Eurasia at the Dawn of History (2016) and Conflict Archaeology: Materialities of Collective Violence from Prehistory to Late Antiquity (2018). He has directed fieldwork in Germany, Spain, Scotland and Croatia.