Theme:
7. Archaeology of Sustainability through World Crises, Climate Change and War
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Archaeology of Wilderness: Humans, Animals and Landscapes throughout the Holocene
Content:
Anthropogenic impact on the environment resulted in unprecedented crises, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Archaeology, with its deep-time perspective on humans and paleoenvironments, has become an active participant in the study of these dramatic Anthropocene changes. Identifying anthropogenic influences on ecosystems and separating these from natural processes is challenging. Bioarchaeological records sequester information on past multispecies communities. The refinement of methods for detecting and differentiating natural processes from human and livestock presence, such as sedaDNA, isotopes, biogeochemistry, and non-pollen palynomorphs but also archaeological and osteological approaches can provide a rich and diverse picture of the past and tell its stories in new ways. These allow us to push the boundaries of our knowledge and test old interpretations of past socio-ecological processes. They provide opportunities to develop new models about human-environment interactions and to examine challenging questions, like how well we can detect changes in disturbance regimes, track changes in the intensity of land use, identify low-intensity activities, Holocene extinctions, past translocations, the genetic diversity of wildlife, animal and plant domestication and the subsequent spread of agriculture, deforestation, urbanization and industrialisation.
This session aims to bring together speakers who apply innovative research designs to explore and communicate the interactions between culture and nature during the Holocene. We encourage the contribution of speakers from diverse fields (including environmental archaeology, multispecies archaeology, bioarchaeology, and archaeogenetics). The need for innovative methods and approaches to study socio-ecological processes is not only necessary for improving knowledge of past human-nature interactions and how these shaped landscapes; they can also help us to build more robust models and theories to connect archaeology and ecology, where answering many ‘grand challenges’ depends on our ability to think across human behaviour and ecosystem processes.
Keywords:
Anthropogenic Landscapes, Human-Nature Interaction, Human-Wildlife Conflicts, Disturbance Regimes, Anthropocene
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Sonja Vukovic (Serbia) 1
Co-organisers:
Petter I. Larsson (Finland) 2
Nimrod Marom (Israel) 3
Ivana Živaljević (Serbia) 4
Affiliations:
1. Laboratory for Bioarchaeology, Archaeology Department, University of Belgrade - Faculty of Philosophy
2. University of Helsinki, Department of Cultures, Archaeology
3. School of Archaeology, University of Haifa
4. University of Novi Sad – Faculty of Philosophy
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