The State of the Field: Emerging Approaches to the Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Twenty-five years ago, Naomi Miller and Katheryn Gleason edited the seminal volume, *The Archaeology of Garden and Field, an authoritative guide to the identification and interpretation of archaeological field systems and other evidence of past agricultural practice inscribed within the landscape. This paper reviews the state of the field today, overviewing a suite of emerging methods that are revolutionizing how archaeologists find ancient field systems, including recent advances in aerial, satellite, and ground-based remote sensing, as well as complementary geochemical, isotopic, and paleobotanical approaches. At the same time, contemporary theoretical discourses exploring the entanglements of humans with their environment—alongside the transdisciplinary debate surrounding the establishment and definition of the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch—bring critical urgency to archaeological identification of past agricultural land use practices. Herein, we argue for the importance of archaeological investigations that prioritize discovery and interpretation of relict fields and their constitution within larger human landscapes, both as a means to better understand people in the past as well as our role as a species in shaping global ecosystems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32933