Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This session brings together scholars working at the intersection of landscape, food, and labor studies within historical archaeology. We will explore the following questions: what kinds of labor and knowledge go into producing agricultural landscapes that become recognizable as such?; in what historical circumstances do plants become commodities?; how do different forms of labor (enslaved, free, indentured, migratory) and knowledges (African, Indigenous, European, American) work together to produce agricultural landscapes with their associated infrastructures, be they plantations, farms, gardens, or other sites of organized crop production? We conceptualize producers, products, and places of production as mutually constitutive: taking inspiration from Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) and Sarah Besky (2013), among others, we propose a multispecies approach to the study of taskscapes, recognizing that the life of a given plant shapes both landscapes and the everyday lives of laborers, allowing us to think relationally and agentically about landscapes, plants, and people.