Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes

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.