The mutual relationship between archaeology and the environment
Summary :
Table of Contents
- Introduction.
- The history of archaeological interest in the environment.
- Climate and sea-level changes.
- Natural changes in plant and animal communities.
- Human impact on the environment.
- Resource use and seasonality.
- Domestic environments from farmstead to town.
- Conclusion.
Abstract
The nature of past environments is a key aspect of archaeology because human action cannot be understood in isolation from its surroundings. For example, the lifestyle of a human group living in a densely forested area in a temperate climate would be very different from that of the same community inhabiting a treeless arctic landscape. Furthermore, in the case of any individual archaeological site, it must be realized that the modern environment may bear little relationship to that of the past. There may have been major changes in climate, sea level, soils, and plant and animal communities over the millennia. Thus a site occupying a coastal setting in the Mesolithic period might now lie several kilometers inland, or it might be completely submerged by the sea. The reconstruction of past environments is based on many types of evidence, ranging from long-term perspectives on climate change provided by analysis of deep sea sediments and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to reconstruction of local plant and animal communities from biological re- mains excavated from archaeological sites. Specialists from many fields, including climatologists, geologists, soil scientists, botanists, and zoologists are involved in analyzing such data.
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