Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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.