Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology is well-suited to highlight the active qualities of materials with its focus on material culture such as artifacts and building features, as well as environmental elements of landscapes such as plant remains and soil. However, the ways people relate to landscapes and materials cannot be separated from power relationships, and the papers in this session embrace materiality without ignoring unequal relations between people. This session brings together scholars working in different areas around the world who reinsert the political into approaches that take seriously the active qualities of materials and landscapes. The materials that we explore embody the social, political, and environmental dimensions of landscapes. The papers in this session consider how the relationships between inequality, power, and ecology are materialized in landscape at multiple scales, from households to settlement. Papers range in global, social, and material context, demonstrating the wider applicability of combining materiality, landscapes, and political ecology to our discipline.

Other Keywords
Mortuary Analysis • Survey • Landscape Archaeology • Historic • historical ecology • Agriculture • Ritual • Paleoethnobotany • Mississippian • arctic

Geographic Keywords
Isle of Man (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Belize (Country) • Republic of Guatemala (Country) • French Republic (Country) • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nort (Country) • Ireland (Country) • Kingdom of Belgium (Country) • Bailiwick of Guernsey (Country) • Faroe Islands (Country)

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  • Documents (7)
Documents
  • Cult and Cultivation: Vulnerability and Resilience on Inishark Island, Co. Galway, Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Critics of new materialism caution that focus on the active qualities of materials and the distributed agency of assemblages obscures the cruelties of inequality that allow the powerful to do as they will and others to suffer what they must. Engaging such critiques, this paper examines the famines in nineteenth-century...

  • The Landscape Materialized in Late Medieval Houses (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social and political ideologies are entangled in the management and control of the ecological landscape. When relations between social institutions shift, it impacts how people interact with their local environment. In this paper, I explore how these relationships are visible within the fabric of a building. During the...

  • Many Communities, Many Foods: The Economic and Political Implications of Diversified Cropping Strategies before, during, and after Urbanism in Northwest India ca. 3200–1500 BC (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Bates. Adam Green. Cameron Petrie. Ravindra Nath Singh. Francesc Conesa.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate crises are raising questions about how we feed everyone in our highly urbanized modern society. Anthropological research has demonstrated that economic, political, and environmental landscapes are intricately interwoven and intersect with the diverse choices of people across all scales of society. Nowhere is this...

  • Materializing Aksumite: Power Plays through Natural Landscape in the Northern Stelae Field (AD 100–400) (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper looks at how the location of the central stelae field in Aksum (in use from ~AD 100–400) took advantage of natural features to amplify Indigenous ideologies. The Northern Stelae Field is the burial location of the most powerful Aksumites, and tradition dictates that at least some were kings. The stelae field is...

  • Mediating Powers, Negotiating Inequalities: Ecological Politics at Cahokia (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper,...

  • Political Ecology Materialized in a Medieval Icelandic Landscape (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...

  • Politicizing Post-Humanism: Elite and Commoner Household Excavations at the Ancient Maya City of Aventura, Belize (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

    This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-humanism importantly considers active roles of nonhuman entities in society. However, it is crucial that power relationships between people do not fall by the wayside when studying past societies. In this paper, I approach geological features at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize, from a perspective that...