Exploring Prehistoric Perceptions of "Nature": Can We Go Beyond Economic Human-Environment Interactions?

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Archaeology has witnessed a theoretical fluorescence of ‘ecological’ approaches (i.e. HBE, Niche Construction, Historical Ecology) resulting in Human-Environment interactions as a common research theme. Western culture traditionally makes a clear distinction between nature and culture but this is not typical of world-views amongst pre-industrial societies. Past perceptions of human relationships with nature are essential for understanding the impact prehistoric societies had on their environments. Here we aim to push theoretical boundaries, to ask how we can understand prehistoric perceptions of ‘nature’. Using varied regions and data sets, can we move beyond the more common essential economic discussions and probe our evidence to gain meaningful insights regarding how people in the past understood their place in ‘nature’. While prehistoric art is often employed towards this question, ecological data sets are usually not. But, could the materials which made the dwellings, the resources that formed the basis of food-ways, and the ecological ‘footprint’ of past societies also provide similar insights? It is with this perspective in mind that we wish to explore human perceptions of nature through interdisciplinary studies. This collaboration could be key to interpreting our ecological and archaeological data sets towards a greater understanding of human behaviour.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)

Documents
  • Adapting to harsh environment resulting changes in culture that led towards a new perception of the outer world: The birth of the Central European Neolithic (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eszter Bánffy.

    In the 6th millennium BC, first farmers reached the area between south east and central Europe, soon spreading into central Europe. About the character and identity of these first farmers at the boundary area, a series of new research results is available. At the boundary, harsh environmental conditions made their long well-working subsistence system unstable, as the ‘package’ of farming and mainly sheep and shifted to cattle keeping. Yet, it has hardly been investigated, what reflections of...

  • "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" –Natufian Cemeteries and Human Perceptions of Nature (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Leore Grosman. Natalie Munro.

    A chief source of information on archaeological cultures is gathered from excavated cemeteries. Burial location and treatment provide insight into many aspects of the daily life, social organization, and ideology of past human populations. In particular, the location and organization of human interments can reveal how past cultures perceived their natural surroundings and their place within them. Through burial, an individual returns to the soil of their homeland symbolizing the connections...

  • ​The decoupling of environment ​and political change in the prehistoric southern Titicaca Basin (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Marie Weide. Maria C. Bruno. Christine A. Hastorf. Sherilyn Fritz.

    As the greater project of this symposium attests, we want to become more aware of the constraints of our historical training and try to not separate culture from nature, or politics from the environment in our study of the past. Towards that end, the authors have been working on understanding water and lake level regimes of the southern Titicaca Basin, to better understand the history of this shallow lake and the people that lived around it from the Formative through the Late Horizon. ...

  • The Entanglement of Nature and Culture in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of Central Anatolia: The Transition of Çatalhöyük East to West (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Biehl. Arkadiusz Marciniak.

    Prehistoric communities need to be seen as firmly embedded in their ecosystem and landscape where the nature is a very real factor in the decision making processes. The human-environmental relationship is complex and non-linear, which different societies shape it in variable ways. Responses to nature are always of social character made of a number of intertwined explicit and implicit elements. They ultimately have far reaching consequences for the condition of any group including a survival in...

  • A Growing Investment in "Place": Exploring Late Pleistocene Perceptions of "Nature" in the Southern Levant (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Ramsey. Tobias Richter. Danielle Macdonald. Lisa Maher.

    The concept of ‘place’ is given structure and meaning by human experience and can be viewed in several forms, including art, monuments and architecture. However, the by-products and material remains associated with the impacts of daily hunter-gatherer place-making, including food and material production as well as processing waste, are also important expressions of human experience and the construction of ‘place’. These material remains provide critical archaeological insight into how people in...

  • Social and Spiritual Landscapes in Ancient Mesopotamia (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Miller.

    Ethnobiologists have demonstrated that shared human cognitive processes generate cross-cultural regularities in how people categorize the natural world. The human ability to recognize taxa means that plant and animal classification is not totally arbitrary. In addition, ancient people would have had place-specific knowledge of the particular plants and animals living in the territories they frequented. Representations of plants and animals in relation to each other in a landscape therefore...

  • Taming the Flood: Religious Response to Climatic Crisis and the Cult of the Great Yu in Early China (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Min Li.

    This paper deals with changes in religious practices during a period when 'Nature' is least stable in early China. It focuses on the rapid spread of new ritual practices and emergence of new ritual networks during the Longshan period (ca. 2300-1800 BCE) as evidence for religious responses to the extraordinary climatic crisis of the late third millennium BCE. It explores the diverse manifestations of the ecological crisis in geomorphological evidence and their implications for a changing...

  • Wild Meets Domestic at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

    One of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment is through the categories of wild and domestic. Some have argued that this distinction is not helpful, and certainly the boundaries are complicated, but it seems most useful to start by asking whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I will explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük (Central Anatolia), and to some...