Cultural Landscapes at the Contested Interface of Archaeocentric and Holistic Approaches to Environmental and Social Impact Assessment

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Advocacy for holistic approaches to managing major community and economic development, coupled with global trends in heritage conservation policy, have brought cultural landscapes into focus as manifestations of co-developed human and ecological systems. International and United States policies support the conservation of cultural landscapes in collaboration with Indigenous Peoples and other local communities. Even as policies have matured, cultural landscape study methodologies remain mired in discipline-, site-, and expert-centric thinking and procedures. Our 2024 expert opinion survey and review of existing cultural landscape study reports reveal five attributes of cultural landscape studies that add value to environmental and social impact assessment. Cultural landscape studies should be (1) Completed early enough in the planning stages for alternative designs to be considered; (2) Reflective of the values, interests, and preferences of the groups of people who maintain the cultural landscapes and are affected by proposed changes; (3) Attentive to landscape-specific human and ecological systems, their co-development, and their physical and cultural manifestations; (4) Inclusive of available information, including ecological, cultural, historical, oral-traditional, and geospatial data sets; and (5) Supportive of timely applications of results in decision making, especially in the translation of community values into recommendations for landscape and site conservation treatments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51089