Abstract
Human manipulation of our planet is far from a modern phenomenon and people’s relationship with the landscapes and environments they live in have varied in space and time, with both parties impacting each other to varying degrees. It is vital to put current debates about the use and abuse of the environment by people into a long-term context, and to get a feeling for how natural any of our current landscapes truly are. This book brings together 12 case studies that highlight these points, showing multiple examples of how people have coped with changing landscapes, and vice versa, in ten different countries at different time periods over the last 110,000 years, but mostly through the Holocene.
Although a discipline still not clearly defined, Geoarchaeology is on the up. The Geoarchaeology session at the recent INQUA congress in Bern, for example, received large numbers of submissions, but it was difficult to pick a common thread or philosophy from all the works. In her introduction to this book, Wilson makes a case for Geoarchaeology as a distinct ‘discipline of its own’ with distinct practitioners, whilst acknowledging that much of the theory around which it is based is still implicit rather than explicit. This is a discussion that needs to be had by geologists, archaeologists and those who consider themselves truly geoarchaeologists already. This Introduction chapter makes an important contribution and starting place for that debate.
Clear from this and other related books on the subject (e.g. Pollard, 1999; Wilson et al., 2007) is that Geoarchaeology is a discipline working on multiple time periods, using multiple techniques. It is, therefore, more the research questions these techniques are used for that define the subject rather than the techniques themselves; the questions based around the theme of this book are prime Geoarchaeological territory.
The book is a collection of distinct case studies, presented by numerous authors, which are briefly summarised here. The chapters are well written and highlight the variety of techniques that can be used to investigate our interactions with the Geosphere through time. It is clear that a four-dimensional view of the landscape is vital in many of the case studies to fully understand how people and the environment have interacted. Studies from one individual site rarely give the full picture for Geoarchaological work on and off archaeological sites that is required to fully appreciate the environmental drivers or responses to human behaviour.
In the book’s second chapter, Olga Trapeznikova highlights the regional perspective of Geoarchaeology, using GIS to investigate environmental limitations on agricultural development on the East European Plain. In Chapter 3, John Kraft and colleagues describe the four-dimensional development of the coastline around the important harbour at Ephesus, Turkey, demonstrating how people had to react, and try to manage the natural changes in the delta and floodplain. Sampietro Vattuone and Neder again take a regional-scale approach in the next chapter, using geomorphological mapping in the Tucuman Province of northwestern Argentina to investigate the relative changes in landscape development and human occupation of the region through the last 2500 years. Also investigating how people have dealt with alluvial fan deposition, Gillmore et al. describe their work on Tepe Paradis on the Tehran Plain, Iran in Chapter 5. The chapter describes sedimentary and pollen analysis as well as dating of the site to place it into a regional environmental and cultural framework between ~7000 and 6000 yr BP, including evidence for early artificial irrigation.
In the following two chapters Gillmore and Melton describe the significance of sand deposits in an early Neolithic site in the Shetland Islands (~5600 yr BP) and Zaihua Liu and colleagues report isotope and deposition rate data from a tufa in the Xiangshui River, SW China, describing how both climatic and human induced land cover change has been reflected in this record.
Chapter 8 sees a return to a more regional study, with Heinzel and Kolb using sedimentary sections and profiles to investigate Holocene land use in western Sicily. Christopher Hill and colleagues take a similar methodological approach to investigating human response to late-Holocene environmental change in the Big Fork River Valley, Minnesota. George Rapp and Zhichun Jing report their findings from two projects investigating the Shang society (c. 3500–3000 yr BP) and their interactions with changing environments in eastern China in Chapter 10, which is followed by a reconstruction of fire history in Bavaria, Germany, by Raab et al. using charcoal analysis.
Lucy Wilson’s own contribution to her edited volume investigates the distribution of raw materials and other resources for the middle Palaeolithic people of southern France. This chapter is distinct in the book as it moves away from an environmental reconstruction focus to something related more to resource availability, key to understanding why people may have chosen one location over others in time, and again highlighting the need for a four-dimensional, regional picture to answer many of the questions geoarchaeologists are expected to answer.
The book’s final chapter by Elizabeth Robertson takes a new look at human behaviour during the warm, dry period during the mid Holocene in the Northern Plains of North America highlighting both archaeological and geological issues that require investigation if past human activities in the region are to be fully understood.
To conclude, this book is an interesting collection of case studies that will be of great interest to those working in these specific areas and beyond. The book raises interesting questions about how we should define Geoarchaeology as a subject, or Geoarchaeologists as scientists, but makes it clear that understanding how people have interacted with the Geosphere though time is vital to better understanding and managing our present-day relationship with the planet we live on.