Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes

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

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological analysis of ancient agricultural fields can provide key anthropological insights into past subsistence strategies, communities’ political economies, environmental entanglements, and ideologies of land, labor, and gender. And yet the subtle traces of agricultural fields (e.g., field boundary features, stone clearance mounds, anthropogenic soils, and artifact scatters) are among the most difficult features to resolve archaeologically. Moreover, the expansiveness of ancient field systems combined with their often ephemeral nature make agricultural landscapes a serious challenge to preserve and protect as they are easily lost to erosional processes and modern development. This session brings together a group of scholars employing innovative new methods to discover, map, and interpret ancient field systems. These new approaches to fields explore the social and political contexts of agriculture, challenge colonial narratives about Indigenous field systems, and engage with emerging global discourses of the Anthropocene.

Other Keywords
Landscape Archaeology • Subsistence and Foodways • Remote Sensing/Geophysics • Digital Archaeology: GIS • Political economy • Geoarchaeology • Survey • Paleoethnobotany • Stable Isotopes • Hohokam

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • USA (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • Missouri (State / Territory) • Kentucky (State / Territory) • Illinois (State / Territory) • Wisconsin (State / Territory) • Belize (Country) • Indiana (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Agricultural Landscapes of the Mesopotamian-Zagros Borderlands (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Jakoby Laugier. Jesse Casana.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Diyala River Region in northern Iraq has long served as a strategic political, economic, and cultural borderland between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros Mountains. The region is also environmentally complex, encompassing a steep gradient of agroecological zones ranging from irrigated alluvial...

  • Feral Fields of the Eastern Adriatic Coast (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Countryman.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On Mediterranean islands and coastal areas of southern Europe, extensive field systems of drystone walls, terraces, and clearance cairns are common landscape features that attest to generations of landscape modification for cultivation. Tracing the precise chronologies of these fields is perennially challenging....

  • Field Systems, Urbanism, and State Formation in the Hawaiian Islands (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy. Jesse Casana. Thegn Ladefoged.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The significance of urbanization and royal centers in the development of productive agricultural systems and state formation has been minimized in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, thanks to several key methodological advances, especially remote sensing using lidar, we are closer than ever to an integrated and...

  • Finding and Understanding Ancient Hohokam Irrigated Agricultural Fields in the Middle Gila River Valley, South-Central Arizona (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Woodson.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a century, archaeologists have investigated the vast network of prehistoric Hohokam canal irrigation systems in the lower Salt and middle Gila River valleys in southern Arizona. However, documentation of the agricultural fields in which prehistoric farmers irrigated their crops generally was lacking until...

  • Finding Terraces in the Lake Titicaca Basin Peru (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie. John Wilson. Jacob Frank.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Driving through the Lake Titicaca basin of southern Peru travelers are often struck by terrace covered hillsides rising from the plain. Nearly every hillside encountered has been transformed from steep faced rocky hillsides into arable land. These ancient fields were constructed and farmed millennia ago to help...

  • Intensification without Modification: Tropical Swidden and the Maya (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As we look at agricultural intensification and the archaeological correlates, we need to understand that capital based investment and arable farming are only one path to intensification. Labor-based economies, especially those of the Americas before European conquest, present an entirely distinct track toward...

  • Isotopic Evidence for Protohistoric Field Locations in Northeastern Illinois (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the western Great Lakes region of the USA, late prehistoric and early historic Indigenous fields are often difficult to investigate because their archaeological signatures are faint and easily destroyed. They have been identified largely via rare remnants of ridged fields and historical records. With the...

  • Locating Wisconsin's Past Indigenous Agricultural Landscapes Using Historical Aerial Photography (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Jesse Casana.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wisconsin has the largest number of recorded precolumbian and early historic Indigenous ridged and hilled garden beds in the American Midwest, with over 450 known examples. But, twentieth-century land-use practices have destroyed or obscured more than 90% of these sites. Leveraging a comprehensive database of...

  • The State of the Field: Emerging Approaches to the Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Casana. Madeleine McLeester.

    This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twenty-five years ago, Naomi Miller and Katheryn Gleason edited the seminal volume, *The Archaeology of Garden and Field, an authoritative guide to the identification and interpretation of archaeological field systems and other evidence of past agricultural practice inscribed within the landscape. This paper...