Life in the Ruins: Historical Ecology in Settler Colonial and Industrial Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Throughout the western hemisphere, historical ecologists working with Indigenous experts have made profound discoveries about the ways in which seemingly pristine ecosystems were shaped by Indigenous knowledge and practice over the course of thousands of years. Key methodologies include surveys of biodiversity and ecosystem structure around archaeological sites and/or ethnoecology, which applies a Western scientific lens to Indigenous knowledge. These approaches are complicated in the US Southeast by the scale and severity of colonial destruction: nearly all of the forests have been clear cut, prairies have been eliminated, and the vast majority of rivers have been modified, transforming floodplains and wetlands. Southeastern landscapes are dominated by simplified industrial ecosystems of commodity crops. Native species continue to be driven to extinction by introduced predators and pathogens and settler colonial land use. The vast majority of the Indigenous people of the Southeast were forcibly removed from their homelands, interrupting their care of the land and making it harder for communities to practice and reproduce ecological knowledge. Despite these immense challenges, it is possible to practice historical ecology in the Southeast, and doing so can provide insights into how to understand and rehabilitate industrial and colonized landscapes around the world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37865.0