Past Societies: Human Development in Landscapes

The Kiel Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ has conducted research on socio-environmental issues of past societies during the last years. From the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from Peru to the Near East, different attempts on the interfluve of environments and societies in landscapes describe certain historical moments and processes in which the interplay of ecological and societal factors is entangled. Events, processes and structures are described on local, regional and global scales as well as methodological developments on ecological and societal archives.

The selected case studies are linked by the general idea of the ability to integrate discovery, documentation, description and interpretation within the scope of analyses and synthesis. Thus, the interdisciplinary framework of the Kiel Graduate School formed the agenda for a holistic approach. ‘Landscapes of power’, transitions during neolithisation processes, maritime and other networks, site formation dynamics, ‘landscapes of identities’ and the ‘making of heritage’ are only a few topics included in this book. The closeness of human behaviour in certain environmental conditions becomes obvious despite the often huge distance in time and space. At the same time, one of the strengths of humanistic science becomes apparent: its commitment to a culture of knowledge across borders.

Table of Contents

Preface
Johannes Müller and Andrea Ricci

Introduction: Concepts of Human Developments in Landscapes: A Structured Research Program
Johannes Müller and Andrea Ricci

Transitions during Neolithisation Processes in Southern Scandinavia: New Insights from Faunal Remains and Pottery from the Site Neustadt LA 156 in Northern Germany
Aikaterini Glykou

Interaction and Networks in the Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture
Julia Menne

Development of Identification Criteria of Non-Dietary Cereal Crop Products by Phytolith Analysis to Study Prehistoric Agricultural Societies
Welmoed A. Out

Early Agriculture in Southern Peru
Hermann Gorbahn and Markus Reindel

Corded Ware and Bell Beaker between Rhine and Saale: Theories, Methods and Results
Ralph Großmann

Settlement History and Tell Formation Processes in the Birecik and Carchemish Sectors of the Euphrates River
Andrea Ricci

Writing the History of ‘Peoples without History’: The Case of the Zagros in the First Millennium BCE
Silvia Balatti

Iron Age Landscapes of Power in the Middle Rhine-Moselle Region
Manuel Fernández-Götz

Meteorological Medicine in the Hippocratic Corpus
Anne Liewert

Do as the Romans do? Human-Environmental Interactions in Ancient Southern Latium
Michael Teichmann and Hans-Rudolf Bork

Palynological Investigations on the Deposits of a Well Shaft from the Roman Iron Age with Special Reference to Non-Pollen Palynomorphs
Magdalena Wieckowska-Lüth and Dieter Bischop

Human-Landscape Interconnections: The Döberitzer Heide in the Early Middle Ages (ca. 7th-11th century) as a Space of Action between the Appropriation of Material Wealth and the Destruction of the Basis of Existence
Donat Wehner

Seafaring of the Hansa to the Shetland Islands, Faroe Islands and Iceland: The Maritime-Archaeological Potential of the North Atlantic Islands in the Late Hanseatic Period
Philipp Grassel

From Salamander to Siren: Landscapes of Identity
Maren Biederbick

Warscapes: Managing Space on the Western Front, 1914-1918
Christoph Nübel

Ethics in the Practice of Archaeology and the Making of Heritage: Understanding beyond the Material
Artur Ribeiro and Gustav Wollentz

Johannes Müller (PhD, University of Freiburg, 1990) is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. He is the founding director of the Johanna Mestorf Academy, Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre “Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” and of the Excellence Cluster “ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies”.

He conducts research on Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, including the challenge of interlinking natural, social, life sciences, and the humanities within an anthropological approach of archaeology. Intensive fieldwork was and is carried out in international teams, e.g., on Tripolye mega-sites in Eastern Europa, the Late Neolithic tell site of Okolište in Bosnia-Hercegovina, different Neolithic domestic and burial sites in Northern Germany, and Early Bronze Age sites in Greater Poland. Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork has been conducted, e.g., in India. Within the Kiel Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes”, now the Young Academy of ROOTS, and the Scandinavian Graduate School “Dialogues of the Past”, Johannes Müller promotes international PhD projects.

Andrea Ricci is an archaeologist specialised in the study of the prehistory of Southwestern Asia. He completed his first MA studies at La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy) and then he received a second MA degree at Durham University (UK). After completing his PhD in the framework of the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” at Kiel University, he held a post-doctoral position at the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute. He is currently a scientific coordinator of the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS at Kiel University. He has conducted field projects in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Syria.

His main research topics include the investigation of Holocene human-environmental dynamics, the process of neolithisation, and the emergence of the first forms of social and economic complexity.