Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nearly 20 years ago, Bender, Winner and their collaborators rattled landscape studies with their book on Contested Landscapes. This formative volume emphasized the non-static, dialogic nature of landscape within a community and acknowledged that the ways that different communities construct, view, and use the landscape can lead to tensions, and even violence. It highlighted the relevance of considering movement, borders, exile, and conflict to understand how people create and reshape their own landscapes. During political conflicts, like colonization and war, people are forced to respond to new politics and hierarchies (sometimes even anarchies) as their personal and communal understanding of the world is deeply transformed through struggle; something visible even today as political tensions constantly reshape local and global landscapes. Perhaps more importantly, understanding the creation and contestation of landscapes in the past is essential for understanding political, economic and cultural manifestations in the present to better organize ourselves for a truly just future. This session brings together researchers whose clear political and theoretical perspectives have led them to explore how conflict laden contexts shape and reshape landscapes during different historical eras around the world.