Defining a contemporary landscape approach: concluding thoughts.

Feinman, Gary M.

In the above papers, two of the participants begin by quoting the cultural geographer Carl Sauer. From my perspective, the recognition given to Sauer by DUNNING and his colleagues as well as GARTNER is timely and important, since it reminds us that the long-term interplay between humans and their environments has long been a central concern in geography as well as archaeology. My comments here endeavour to reflect upon and address that general theme towards framing a coherent landscape approach in archaeology. In so doing, space does not also allow for a detailed commentary on each of the articles that compose this section.

For my own principal study region (Oaxaca, Mexico), 29 years have passed since Ronald Spores' (1969) seminal publication in which he outlined the prehispanic construction of lama-bordo agricultural systems in the Mixteca Alta in the Oaxaca highlands. The use of the lama-bordos required intentional stimulation of erosion. Stone and rubble dikes were constructed and designed to trap water and eroding soils as they descended the natural drainage channels that extended from mountains to the valley floor during heavy summer rains. These stone dikes were i to 4 m high and could be tens (even hundreds) of metres long. Following several years of runoff, the lama-bordo terrace systems accumulated sufficient soil to form level and rather fertile plots that returned significant yields. Spores also noted that the lamabordo systems appear to have remained productive during the later part of the prehispanic sequence, as long as the terrace walls were kept in place and carefully maintained. However, with post-contact demographic collapse and changes in tribute patterns, work and land-use patterns were disrupted. The continual labour necessary to rebuild and maintain these

agrarian features was lost and massive unchecked erosion precipitated, which was hastened by grazing and the intentional removal of the natural vegetation. The heavy erosion that today still scars the Nochixtlan Valley and other parts of the Mixteca Alta was the consequence.

In many senses, Spores' (1969) classic article foreshadows directly the convincing analyses of parallel findings presented here by ERICKSON for Bolivia and FISHER for Patzcuaro. In both cases, the most serious landscape upheavals occurred with population decrease and political decline rather than with demographic growth. But remembrances of the studies of Sauer and Spores also raise other more challenging issues. For example, what exactly is meant by a landscape approach? What, if anything, do the diverse set of papers in this collection share theoretically? What have we learned since the prescient works of Spores and Sauer?

Let me endeavour to begin a dialogue by addressing my own rhetorical questions. One thing that clearly has changed over the last three decades is the suite of methods and techniques that we can employ to examine a dynamic environment. These procedures include AMS dating and a wide array of sediment analyses, as well as other geoarchaeological techniques that were not available to Saner or Spores. These methods allow for the evaluation of environmental evidence at a level of detail and precision that was unavailable to earlier scholars. Yet these innovations are present in only some of the above papers. In and of themselves, these new methods and procedures (no matter how significant they may be) do not alone define a new landscape approach. Nevertheless, as we see in several of the articles, the application of these new methods and procedures for analysing the environment can provide important new data for archaeology when they are explicitly marshalled to address anthropological questions.

Perhaps more significantly, the majority of the studies in this collection appear to represent a theoretical response and challenge to the catastrophic and environmental deterministic thinking that has endured in the archaeological literature for at least a century (e.g. Kolata 1996). In defining a landscape approach, the authors for this collection seem to recognize that consideration and analysis of the environment is critically important for understanding human society and culture. But they also realize that most environments are neither pristine nor independent entities unaffected by past human action (Denevan 1992; Dunning et al. 1999; Thurston 1999). Most of the papers in this symposium seem to share a more dynamic perspective on human-environmental relations, one that views human landscapes as also, in part, human constructions. In other words, when it comes to human-environmental relations, history matters and so does culture (with apologies to Gould 1986).

If we can use the work in this special section as a guide, three tenets appear to be central for the landscape approach:

1 a dedicated effort to examine the physical environment, often using a diverse suite of natural science techniques, but with explicit social scientific questions guiding the research;

2 the recognition that human-environment interactions, are historically contingent, dynamic and accretionary, shaped by distinct cultural perceptions and past human actions; and

3 the realization that human environments are in themselves partly products or constructions of a dynamic interaction with human behaviour.

Advocates of a landscape approach consequently resist the oft-held notion that human behaviour is simply governed or determined by an independent 'natural' or physical environment. In all of these underlying tenets, the landscape approach productively builds on earlier theoretical currents and investigatory directions in human ecology (e.g. Vayda and McCay 1975) and settlement archaeology (e.g. Feinman & Nicholas 1990).

In closing, I wish to hazard a final opinion that perhaps will seem more controversial for the authors in this collection. My suspicion is that if we want to push simplistic environmental determinism and catastrophic explanations of human landscape change off the anthropological agenda once and for all, then we will have to address the adherents of these views in paradigmatic terms that they themselves understand and will have to take seriously. That is, we must address the study of landscapes with systematically collected data, careful evaluations of alternative explanations, and amassed evidence. I believe that if we do so, as we have witnessed in the majority of the papers presented in this collection, then the overwhelming weight of evidence will be on our side and there will be further opportunities to move disciplinary consensus in our direction. I suspect that if we adhere to the more narrative and conjectural investigations that sometimes fall under the rubric of landscape approaches, the positions advanced will not be entirely convincing to the specific deterministic scholars that we want to debate and persuade. Perhaps in defining an overarching landscape approach, this also is a consideration that should receive careful attention.

References

DENEVAN, W.M. 1992. The pristine myth: the landscape of the Americas in 1492, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 82: 369-85.

DUNNING, N., V. SCARBOROUGH, F. VALDEZ, JR, S. LUZZADDER-BEACH, T. BEACH & J.G. JONES. 1999. Temple mountains, sacred lakes, and fertile fields: ancient Maya landscapes in northwestern Belize, Antiquity 73: 650-60.

FEINMAN, G.M. & L.M. NICHOLAS. 1990. Settlement and land use in ancient Oaxaca, in J, Marcus (ed.), Debating Oaxaca archaeology: 71-113. Ann Arbor (MI): Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Anthropological Papers 84.

GOULD, S.J. 1986. Evolution and the triumph of homology, or Why history matters, American Scientist 74: 60-69.

KOLATA, A.L. (ed.). 1996. Tiwanaku and its hinterland: archaeology and paleoecology of an Andean civilization. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution Press.

SPORES, R. 1969. Settlement, farming technology, and environment in the Nochixtlan Valley, Science 166: 557-69.

THURSTON, T. 1999. The knowable, the doable and the undiscussed: tradition, submission and the 'becoming' of rural landscapes in Denmark's Iron Age, Antiquity 73: 660-70.

VAYDA, A.P. & B.J. MCCAY. 1975. New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 293-306.