Deep Ecology: An Introduction and an Inquiry

Summary

Archaeology has engaged with ecology in various ways over the years. Recently, post-humanist thinking has gained popularity as an approach, urging us to think about human and non-humans relationally, as having contingent qualities that vary in relation to their interaction over time. Simultaneously, we see increasing attempts to think with indigenous philosophies and descendent communities about what the environment is and does. However, there remains a disconnect between approaches that seek to include indigenous philosophies and/or post-humanist approaches, and much work of the ecological sciences which are developing at a rapid pace, providing greater precision and clarity of information. This paper considers the history of archaeology’s relationship to the idea and study of ecology, and proposes the concept of "Deep Ecologies" as an approach to human-nonhuman interactive pasts that offers the opportunity to bridge some of these perceived divides, while also being attentive to the politics of attempts to do so and the appropriative histories of archaeological work in this vein. It serves as an organizing thesis statement for the session, which presents attempts to grapple with the idea of "deep ecology" through ten years of archaeological fieldwork in northern New Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22574