Political ecology (Other Keyword)
1-19 (19 Records)
In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural anthropologist Roy Rappaport criticized the effects of the West on the developing world. Well before Crosby popularized the term, Rappaport labeled this process "Ecological Imperialism" to clarify the unequal relationship between the needs of an empire and environments it absorbs. Rappaport wrote when scientists were beginning to observe global ecological degradation, but anthropologists had yet to develop a historical perspective. Over the past decade,...
Bureaucratic Reforms on the Frontier: Zooarchaeological and Historical Perspectives on the 1767 Jesuit Expulsion in the Pimeria Alta (2017)
The introduction of livestock to the Pimeria Alta (northern Sonora and southern Arizona), was one prong of Spanish imperial expansion into North America initiated largely by Jesuit missionization. Unlike other areas of North America, the missions in this region experienced an enormous bureaucratic transition following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and the subsequent arrival of Franciscan missionaries. Historians and historical anthropologists debate the social and economic impacts of...
English Building Entanglements between Medieval and Modern (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Medieval to Modern Transitions and Historical Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. A building’s materials extend beyond the stone, brick, timber, and metals that are visible in its fabric. During the medieval period in England, materials such as timber and stone were managed and accessed through engagement with feudal powers. A series of entanglements, between lords, peasants, and the Catholic...
From Food to Fodder: Colonial Settlement and Changing Relationships with Prosopis on Peru's North Coast in the 16th Century CE (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Colonial (re)settlement is a process of rearticulation in which people's relationships with landscapes and political institutions are often drastically reconfigured. These relationships include not just attachments to places and configurations of built environments, but also connections...
Growing the Scorched Ground Green: Confronting the Past and Looking Towards the Future of California’s Ecology (2018)
In the last several years the topic of Native American land use and land rights has gained renewed interest in academic, political, and public discourse. This paper explores how late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Euro-American discourse about the preservation and conservation of nature led to the creation of National Parks at the expense of the indigenous groups who inhabited it. Focusing primarily on California Indians, I examine historical, theoretical, and archaeological data...
Home on the Range: An Environmental History of Land Use Changes at Paa-ko, New Mexico (2015)
By using multiple lines of evidence from the archaeological material record, as well as from the environmental pollen record, this paper will explore the history of anthropogenic landscape changes at one particular site in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico. Located on the margins of the Spanish mission system, the ancestral Pueblo site of Paa-ko and its surrounding field systems present an ideal opportunity to tease out the thread of colonial influences on local communities, particularly with the...
Long-term Impact of Settlement Location on Economic Status: A Geospatial Analysis in Skagafjörður, Iceland (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes Above and Below in Northern Contexts (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Environmental resources are unevenly distributed, but does differential access have long-term effects on relative economic status? During Iceland's settlement in the 9th and 10th centuries, all of the island's agriculturally productive lowlands were claimed by powerful settlers. These large land claims were...
Making Place in the Capitalocene: The Toxic Legacies of Mill Creek Ravine (2018)
Recent archaeological work has highlighted how the objects archaeologists study—far from being inert representations of the past—are lively, political, and potent in the present. This paper proposes that archaeological studies of the industrialized modern world must extend this reflexive turn to questions of ecological harm and pollution. Drawing from my excavations of an early twentieth-century industrial worker’s camp in Edmonton, Alberta I investigate how the rise of industrial-scale...
Making Waste Singular: The Ecological Life of Industrial Waste in Mill Creek Ravine (2019)
This is an abstract from the "One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Industrialization is defined by the mass production of commodities, explicitly produced to be non-singular objects. However, as scholars such as Igor Kopytoff have argued, commodities are singularized through their unique histories of social relations. Alongside the production of commodities,...
Of Marsh and Mangal: Political/Historical Ecology in Tampa Bay’s Coastal Wetlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, dense mangrove forests dominate the intertidal wetlands of the Tampa Bay Estuary System in west-central Florida. Following the publication of seminal ecology studies in the 1960’s, sub-tropical mangrove forests became a major focus of coastal environmental protection and restoration initiatives in Florida. Recent GIS-based historical research by the...
Pastoralisms of the Andes: a southern and central Andean perspective (2017)
In this paper we contrast and compare the development of pastoralism at two opposite yet complimentary geographical locations with a focus on pastoralist impact on the environment. In Argentina we present the evolution and development of pastoralism [c. 3,300-400BP] in the arid highlands of Antofagasta de la Sierra, as societies negotiated the shift from hunter-gathering to a more mixed, but increasingly, pastoralist economy culminating in late complex agro-pastoralist adaptations. Similarly in...
The Political Ecology of Plantations from the Ground Up (2016)
The domestic economies of households occupied by enslaved laborers are an important domain of analysis for understanding the political ecology and environmental legacy of colonial empires. These households occupy an important intersection of environment, political economy, and culture, and provide an opportunity to exploring both top-down and bottom-up processes of environmental and economic change. This paper presents preliminary research onto households from excavations at Morne Petate in...
Political Ecology of Postclassic Maya Plant Use at Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, México. (2016)
This presentation examines a case study of changes in Maya plant use at several closely located sites during the middle-to-late Postclassic Period (~1300-1525 CE) at Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. These sites were inhabited contemporaneously and exhibit substantive differences in size and political/economic importance, making the archaeobotanical assemblages recovered from them uniquely suited for a study focusing on how they were created by social processes. It specifically examines whether...
Pollen Analysis as a Proxy for Land Use Practices in Massachusetts, 1500-1700 CE (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Questions of land—who owns it, who controls it, who alters it—are central to human relationships, particularly in colonial contexts where power dynamics are embedded within the physical landscape. In Massachusetts, land was central to cooperation and conflict between the Wampanoag and English. Land...
Prey Choice and Politics: Modelling Postclassic Maya Wood Selection at La Punta, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
How did Postclassic Maya communities decide which tree species to harvest for firewood and timber in a diverse forest environment? Most studies of ancient tree selection have used the principles of optimal foraging to construct a baseline of expectations for interpreting archaeological charcoal datasets. This paper will explore the implications of such a model on the interpretation of wood charcoals from the site of La Punta in Chiapas, Mexico, while also considering how the political structure...
Storytelling REDD+: Interactions and Inequalities between Global Environmental Governance and Local Lives (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While environmental governance initiatives, such as climate change mitigation mechanisms, are often framed in scientific and economic terms, they are entangled with diverse processes of socio-environmental change that cross ontological and epistemological borders. This research is an attempt to complicate the stories that are told about environmental governance and develop a narrative...
Subsistence ecology in the making of the Shang state, Eastern China (2016)
This study examines the transition of subsistence practices in early Bronze Age sites in eastern China, when the region was integrated into the Shang state in the second millennium BC. Through a combination of geomorphological and archaeobotanical analyses, I reconstruct the long-term environmental history as well as land-use practices at the Yueshi cultural sites, to explore a variety of responses and adaptations that would have been developed before and after the Shang expansion into the area....
Traditional Resource Management in the Sierra Nevada of California (2016)
There is general agreement that past Native American populations significantly modified Sierra Nevada landscapes in California leading to a variety of beneficial resource outcomes. Further, many argue that through their lengthy history in the region, Native peoples initiated cascading regional effects on forest composition and structure in the Sierra Nevada. With this in mind, agencies and researchers are turning to the past to develop more effective resource management protocols. Concordantly,...
Water Management, Ritual Ideology, and Environmental Change in Bronze Age Sardinia (2016)
The Nuragic culture of Bronze Age Sardinia (c. 1700-900 BCE) is known for building thousands of monumental stone towers called nuraghi throughout the island. However, toward the end of the Bronze Age, Nuragic leaders stopped building nuraghi and instead constructed underground temples over naturally occurring springs. Previous research assumes that this architectural shift took place rapidly in the Final Bronze Age (c. 1175-1020 BCE), representing a sudden rise in the importance of water ritual....