Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Globally, communities have often surrounded their everyday habitats, their sociopolitical centers, their burial grounds, and their sacred sites with symbolic and/or economically useful trees and plants. Archaeological perspectives demonstrate how cultural land use was a driver of ecosystem change through time. For example, forests once considered “wild” are now in many regions seen as the direct reflection of past human activity, as communities actively managed forested foodsheds and woodlands with important economic use. In other instances, trees can remain the longest lasting legacy of otherwise short-term occupations. This session gathers scholars of diverse regions of the world and temporal foci who apply varied data sources (archaeological, anthropological, and historical or a combination thereof) to speak to the importance of particular tree species for ceremonial and/or quotidian use or to the management of forests as cultural and natural landscapes. Papers highlight particular methods (e.g., GIS, anthracology, botanical surveys, pollen analysis, community engagement), theoretical perspectives (e.g., nonhuman object agency, historical ecology), and/or specific themes (settlement pattern analysis, spatial analysis, phenomenology, cultural landscapes) in their exploration of human-forest-tree dynamics.