Understanding how humans interact with environmental variation is central to archaeological inquiry. Yet what we can know about these interactions in the past and how we can apply such information to problems today—if we should at all—remains debated. Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump convene more than 50 expert authors across 30 contributed chapters to engage with this dialogue directly. The result is another iconic contribution to the Oxford Handbook series that shows how historical ecology and applied archaeology have come into their own.
This review highlights several core themes across selected chapters, including the benefits and challenges of being interdisciplinary and the ways that scholars are mobilizing ecological legacies, embracing falsifiability and failure, and centering participatory research and community engagement.
A first theme is recognition of the benefits and challenges of being an interdiscipline. The interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) study of ecology and society is open to nearly every academic discipline and professional field (Carole L. Crumley, Chapter 1). Collaboration across disciplines certainly provides great opportunity (E. Christian Wells, Chapter 28) as well as significant challenges, including conflicting definitions (William E. Doolittle, Chapter 3; Paul J. Lane, Chapter 4), tensions and synergies between quantitative and qualitative approaches (William Baleé and Justin M. Nolan, Chapter 19), issues with linking data types that differ in scale or grain (Lane, Chapter 4; R. Lee Lyman, Chapter 10), and differing objectives of the scholarly enterprise itself (Isendahl and Stump, Chapter 30).
Good interdisciplinary work can produce outcomes that are greater than the sum of their individual contributing disciplines. Geoarchaeology provides one example detailed by Karl W. Butzer (Chapter 7) and Federica Sulas (Chapter 13), as do the common anthropological synergies between ethnography and archaeology so that past and present can inform one another (Anabel Ford and Keith C. Clarke, Chapter 9; Baleé and Nolan, Chapter 19). Other interdisciplinary work involves borrowing methods and concepts from one field and applying them to answer questions in another, such as Ashley Coutu's (Chapter 11) summary of inferring historic African elephant diet from stable isotopes to inform conservation efforts, Charles French's (Chapter 14) review of applying geographic information systems to understand the coupled drivers of climate and human adaptation on local environments, and Michael E. Smith's (Chapter 25) examination of how we can leverage broader social science fields to measure quality of life in the past.
A second theme features the mobilization of ecological legacies. Some ecological legacies reviewed in this volume were constructed intentionally (Lorenzo Caponetti, Chapter 21), whereas others were unintentional feedbacks (Joseph A. Tainter and T. F. H. Allen, Chapter 29). Some provide a benefit to future generations, such as the legacy of agricultural crops that help meet food demand today (Paul E. Minnis, Chapter 2), Etruscan burrows that have collected and distributed water for millennia (Caponetti, Chapter 21), or ancient Andean agricultural infrastructure that can be revived and modified under changing climate regimes (Ann Kendall and David Drew, Chapter 22). Other legacies were a hindrance to which descendants must adapt (French, Chapter 14; Tainter and Allen, Chapter 29).
Chapters repeatedly illustrate how archaeological insights into past ecological legacies can inform current policy and development efforts, including those around land use in southern Africa (Karl-Johan Lindholm, Chapter 17), irrigation in Oceania (Matthew Spriggs, Chapter 20), water management in the Maya Lowlands (Isendahl et al., Chapter 26), landscape engineering in the Amazon (Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Chapter 6), and the resilience of urban centers across the planet (Paul Sinclair et al., Chapter 27). Careful tacking between contemporary ecological knowledge and archaeological evidence can reveal otherwise hidden phenomena, such as how community-level resource management in Iceland led to the sustained harvesting of duck populations for over a millennia at what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Megan Hicks et al., Chapter 12). By taking an applied focus, archaeology can mobilize past ecological legacies to offer current and future generations new ways of adapting to our changing environments (Jago Cooper and Lindsay Duncan, Chapter 23).
A third theme is the embrace of falsifiability and failure. There is a real danger when our work cannot be falsified or allowed to fail. This is particularly true for applied archaeology, because if our conclusions about the past cannot be falsified and our application of that information to the present cannot fail, then we risk doing real harm. As C. Michael Barton (Chapter 15, p. 279) notes, “If we are simply recounting the past, the ‘correctness’ of our interpretations—the stories we tell—is not really all that important. . . .However, if our accounts of social organization and change have the potential to alter social policies, with consequences for the lives and well-being of real people, then the correctness of our interpretations matters a great deal.”
Falsifiability is central in many quantitative studies. Building and verifying agent-based models of Maya socioecological systems can provide new insights into the complex dynamics that structured social and environmental systems (Scott Heckbert et al., Chapter 16). Carefully validating models also allows for projection into the future with estimates of uncertainty in potential outcomes (French, Chapter 14). Barton (Chapter 15) provides a compelling review of modeling approaches in archaeology, emphasizing how building and testing falsifiable models of long-term human–environment interactions allow us to offer insights of interest to the broader social sciences. Validation can also include more qualitative approaches, such as the “participatory checking” of research results with community members (Camilla Årlin et al., Chapter 18).
Allowing failure is necessary, especially in applied work. Top-down projects that are pushed onto local community members against their wishes will—and should—fail, as many examples from the Andes illustrate (Alexander Herrera, Chapter 24). Sometimes, although projects may fail in their initial intentions, they may succeed in the long run by providing community members with new opportunities not envisioned by the original design. For example, Spriggs (Chapter 20) highlights efforts to revive an intensive taro-farming system on Aneityum, an island in the Vanuatu archipelago. Chapters in this volume show that true failure is not allowing our work to adapt, especially as the needs and desires of communities change.
A final theme is the centering of participatory research and community engagement. This thread runs through nearly every chapter, and it highlights the diversity of approaches and possible outcomes. Archaeology can help uncover lost knowledge systems to help contemporary communities (Stump, Chapter 8), but it can also be leveraged against them, such as using the concept of untouched wilderness to exclude descendant communities from conservation lands (Anneli Ekblom, Chapter 5). Årlin and colleagues (Chapter 18) draw attention to the nuanced power relationships that exist between researchers and participants, noting that all scholars should ask, “Who benefits?” Chapters also illustrate cases where a failure to acknowledge archaeological evidence may also hurt communities, such as policies that leverage historical records to reify colonial legacies without looking deeper in the past (Lindholm, Chapter 17).
As Stump and Isendahl note in the introduction, openly discussing the difficulty with defining many of the central concepts of this interdiscipline actually brings more meaning. Contributions in this volume do not shy away from tough questions, and they are not afraid to underscore ambiguity. In this way, rather than merely being told about the field, the reader is invited into a discourse on historical ecology and applied archaeology that facilitates a broader sense of the field and where it is going, which is more than one can ask for in a volume of this type.
