A "Landscape of Ancestors"—Looking Back and Thinking Forward

Summary

In 2002, we completed the excavation of two early Iron Age burial monuments in southwestern Germany as part of the “Landscape of Ancestors” project. After more than a decade of restoration and laboratory analysis, the project is now being prepared for publication. Our research is focused on a complex mortuary landscape from 720 to 400 B.C. and our perspectives on that landscape have been substantially influenced by ideas of landscape, time, and society that we absorbed as graduate students from Carole Crumley and William Marquardt’s Regional Dynamics: Burgundian Landscapes in Historical Perspective (1987), which presented an innovative multiscalar approach to human history in a particular place, as well as from other contemporary works such as the edited volume Social Relations and Spatial Structures (1985) by geographers Derek Gregory and John Urry, and the now classic Postmodern Geographies (1989) by Edward Soja. These pioneering works fueled a career-long interest in the intersections of historical ecology, critical social geography, and experiential human geography. In this paper, we reflect on these connections and on how they continue to open pathways of understanding today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Historical Ecology, Heterarchy and Multitemporal Dynamics: Papers in Honor of Carole Crumley

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