Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Environmental historians have highlighted the ways in which European colonialisms of the 15th through 18th centuries CE led to large-scale changes in environments and ecologies, from the so-called ‘Columbian-exchange’, to the linked processes of Indigenous genocide and reforestation, to the effects of introduced livestock on pastoral landscapes. In this symposium, we seek to mobilize archaeological scholarship to re-examine colonialisms’ entanglements with more intimate human-environment interactions––networks of relationships between people, animals, plants, soils, waters, and beyond that shape and sustain both human life and political institutions. We analyze the ways in which invaders, colonists, Indigenous people and other agents in distinct colonial contexts negotiated relationships and policies around access to land, water rights, and human labor, against the backdrop of an evolving political ecology of empire and acquisition, and we consider the longer-term (sometimes unanticipated) consequences that resulted from these negotiations.