CONCEPTS LINKING SPECIES interrelationships emerged from geographical studies of plant and animal distributions in the early nineteenth century, and were given additional impetus through Darwin and particularly Wallace’s suggestions of an evolutionary base for such interrelationships. The conceptualization of ecology as a field of study is often traced to the first use of the term by Ernst Haeckel in 1858, derived from the Greek words oikos (habitation or habitat) and logos (study), as well as to the conception by Karl Mobius in 1877 of a biocenosis as a region that can be characterized by particular plant and animal taxa. To this were added concepts of limiting factors by von Liebig, biogeochemical cycles by Suess, and vegetative succession by Clements. By the 1920s, ecology had become an organizing framework for broadly based models of plant and animal relationships between and within geographical zones, as reflected by the adoption of the terms “biosphere” by Venadsky and “ecosystem” by Tansley (1935). From the beginning, the approach was a process-oriented one that linked empirical data on the numbers and biomass of organisms through models derived from the laws of thermodynamics (especially entropy), using trophic relations to create concepts of food webs, food chains, and ecological niches (Elton 1927; Gause 1934). Given that a major focus was on the abundance as well as distribution of organisms, demographic data, including life histories, were importantly involved. Classical syntheses of these ideas, on both spatial and temporal levels, were achieved by the 1950s (Odum 1953; Hutchinson 1959; Andrewartha and Birch 1954). These approaches moved field biology from a normative, taxonomically based science to one focused on interactive processes. During the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of ecologists such as Pielou, Pianka, MacArthur, and Whittaker, it moved toward becoming a more quantitative field.
The adoption of ecological models in the social sciences began to develop in the early twentieth century as a part of the same milieu, in which an analytical focus shifted from historical, particularistic, taxonomic approaches to process-based ones. Their application in archaeology depended largely on the intellectual context in which archaeology itself was developed within different national traditions. In the United States, where archaeology was linked to anthropology (and to some degree with geography) in the study of indigenous traditions, most archaeological models (e.g., concepts of cotraditions and taxonomic hierarchies) can be seen as attempts to align archaeological data with cultural and geographic theory. Thus, in the United States until at least the late 1930s, a historical, particularistic, taxonomic approach in archaeology reflected in part its state of development, but was also reinforced by the diffusionistic traditions in both geography and anthropology, and in particular the Boasian tradition in cultural anthropology, derived from Ratzel’s Kulturkreis school, which sought explanations on local scales as a result of diffusion of material culture and ideologies.
In Europe (and especially the United Kingdom), where anthropology and archaeology were separated institutionally and ideologically, each had a separate trajectory. Under the influence of V. Gordon Childe, archaeology sought explanations for culture change that combined diffusionism with an evolutionary framework whose locus was primarily sociopolitical. In contrast, cultural anthropology, following the lead of Emile Durkheim, moved in the 1930s to the functionalist approach of Malinowski and especially Radcliffe-Brown (1922). Although this functionalism originally owed more to Durkheimian sociopolitical explanation than to ecological explanation, this began to change with the work of Evans-Pritchard and particularly Darryl Forde (1934). Forde’s work in turn influenced a younger, developing school of American geographers in the 1930s through the 1950s who sought a compromise between earlier diffusionism and the equally debilitating environmental determinism of Semple (1911), Huntington (1915), and others who linked sociopsychological phenomena to latitude and climate.
It was in this context, in the 1930s, that some American anthropologists and archaeologists began to pull away from strict Boasian particularism toward developing explanatory frameworks for cultural locations, populations, technologies, economies, and even sociopolitical features. Some of these, including Kroeber and Steward, were former students of Boas. Their adoption of an ecological framework for explanation can be attributed in part to the influence of British functionalism, but was largely a result of the peculiarities of the American experience. They tended to view Native American cultures as inextricably linked to, or even part of, the natural environment, as was reflected by their universal display in natural history museums. Allied to this was the concept of noble savages, which reflected sympathy for elements perceived to have been lost from the European experience. More substantively, it also reflected the limited pre-Columbian sociopolitical complexity that existed in North America; and the accident of earliest European contact specifically with Algonkian peoples, who had limited sociopolitical complexity and of necessity developed conservation practices related to boreal forest adaptations (Krech 2000).
Another important factor in the eventual ascendance of an ecological framework in American archaeology was the fact that in early-twentieth-century America, anthropologists as individuals (including Boas himself) often practiced both cultural anthropology and archaeology within the unifying framework of the historical development of Native American cultures. Eventually expanding on the geographically based and diffusion-driven concept of cultural areas developed by Mason (1895) and others at the beginning of the century, Boas’s student Alfred Kroeber wrote Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (1939) in the 1920s, which suggested ecological linkage between cultural areas (Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, Great Basin, Southwest U.S., Great Plains, Prairies, Northeast U.S., Southeast U.S.) and natural environments. Although these linkages were correlative rather than explanatory, they at least recognized the importance of ecology as an organizing framework for the distribution of population numbers, technologies, and other traits among Native American groups.
At about the same time, Boas’s student Julian Steward began to be impressed, on a more local scale, with the linkage between ecological features (the abundance and distribution of food resources) and the numbers, distributions, subsistence patterns, and sociopolitical organization of Great Basin groups, published in Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (Steward 1938). Steward had, like Boas and Kroeber, practiced archaeology as well as cultural anthropology, and this experience led him to suggest a functional framework, by which he meant the Fordian ecological variant of functionalism, for application to both cultural anthropology and archaeology (Steward and Setzler 1938). Ecological factors had an important role to play in his concept of culture change and (multilinear) cultural evolution, more so than in the later (unilineal) cultural evolutionary scheme of Leslie White (1949), which while embracing energetics for the first time, also allowed less room for environmental influence in the development and transformations of human culture. Steward (1955) formally coined the term “cultural ecology,” and conceived of it as a methodology for examining the relationships between human groups and their environments, rather than a factual body of data governing the nature of those relationships. Nevertheless, at its heart was the concept of the culture core, which suggested, as Steward had in his own Great Basin work, that ecological factors were important determinants of certain aspects of culture (technology, demography, subsistence, economics) and less important in other aspects of culture (social structure, political organization, ideology). John Bennett, who worked with northern Plains Indians, followed up on these concepts in archaeology (Bennett 1943) as well as in cultural anthropology, eventually developing synthetic treatments of cultural ecology (Bennett 1995). Similar ideas were being put forward by Sauer (1939) in the field of geography.
There are at least three major developments that occurred after the early 1940s to move the discussion of ecology in archaeology onto a broader plain. The first of these, again under European influence, was the discovery of the importance of organic, nonartifactual materials such as animal bones and plant remains in yielding information about prehistoric subsistence, pioneered by Grahame Clark at Cambridge beginning in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s (Clark 1952, 1954). Such materials were beginning to have increased importance in reconstructing prehistoric human subsistence and its relationship to environmental factors, and became particularly so in large interdisciplinary expeditions such as that of Braidwood (1953) to explore the origins of food production in the ancient Near East. Reflecting this, Walter Taylor (1948), in his A Study of Archaeology, combined both the theoretical ideas of Steward and Bennett, and the practical ideas about collecting ecofactual information in developing his conjunctive approach in archaeology. A second development was the ongoing discussion in geography and anthropology about the role of environment in the development of culture, resulting in extended discussions about the indigenous cultures and archaeology of the Amazonian region, along with other tropical forest environments (Ferndon 1943; Meggers 1955; Carneiro 1961). Meggers’s approach, while not embracing the full measure of Huntington’s behavioral version of environmental determinism, was quasi-deterministic in its import, although it became known as possiblism (i.e., the notion that environments made available a possible range of outcomes within which culture could act).
A third factor in the rise of ecological archaeology during this time period was the development of aerial photography during World War II, which allowed examination of broad areas in ways not previously possible, beginning with the work by Gordon Willey (1953) in coastal Peruvian valleys. On the Peruvian coast an accident of geography produced discretely bounded environmental units (lush river valleys separated by true desert) which were highly correlated with cultural units (individual valley polities). This situation continued at least until the late prehistoric Chimu and Inka periods, when the advent of intervalley road systems in turn made intervalley suprapolities possible. This gave impetus to a research focus shifting from individual sites to regional settlement patterns, a concept which became quickly embraced by other archaeologists (cf. Willey 1962). Although environmental factors did not exclusively underlie this concept, they were paramount, especially in treatments at the scale of sites, regions, and landscapes rather than intrasite patterning. Others attempted to marry more directly the settlement pattern approach with concepts deriving from cultural anthropology. The approach by Beardsley et al. (1955) to developing a “functional and evolutionary typology of settlement pattern” attempted to do so by developing terminology such as “restricted wanderers” or “central-based wanderers” to reflect ecologically based evolutionary stages of settlement patterns associated with different degrees of mobility or permanence. Others, such as K. C. Chang, sought out a more explicit ecological framework for settlement patterns, linking them by analogy with modern cultural groups (Chang 1962). These approaches maintained the concept that in order to explore the relationship between culture and nature, archaeologists needed to seek logical units that reflect the organizational ideas of cultural anthropologists. Eventually environmental factors received primacy in studies of settlement patterns, especially on regional scales (Grady 1979).
All of these approaches changed with the advent of processual archaeology (the New Archaeology) in the early 1960s, when a fundamental paradigm explicitly embraced ecological studies as a part of its raison d’être. In his formulation of archaeology as anthropology, Binford (1962) saw reconstructing culture history, reconstructing human lifeways at given times in the past, and seeking explanatory cultural processes as the fundamental goal of archaeology, with “culture” defined as “man’s extrasomatic means of adaptation” (sensu Leslie White). In this schema, environmental phenomena pervaded both the reconstruction of past lifeways and the explanation of cultural process. Binford (1964) also saw explaining ideology in the past as dabbling in mentalistic “paleopsychology,” and argued that archaeologists had more fundamental contributions to make in areas where their data were stronger—in areas of subsistence and economic adaptations. This highly materialistic approach separated Binfordian archaeology from the notions of Leslie White, even though Binford acknowledges his energetic approach as an early influence. In that sense, it began a break with the standard cultural anthropology of the time, although it mirrored the work of a minority of influential cultural anthropologists such as Marvin Harris (1966, 1968) who operated in a similarly materialistic-ecological framework, and the growing school of ecosystemic cultural ecology represented by Vayda and Rappaport (1968). Both processual archaeologists and ecosystemic cultural anthropologists embraced, for a time, the ideas of systems analysis (Flannery 1968), although both abandoned this approach when it proved difficult to relate to ultimate causation of culture change (e.g., through environmental events).
Processual archaeology insisted that explanatory frameworks (and eventually cultural laws) be tested deductively on appropriate bodies of archaeological data; these hypotheses generally embraced ecological as well as related technological and demographic concepts (Spooner 1972; Hassan 1981; Paine 1997). These explanatory frameworks were to be tested scientifically, with the use of quantified data, sampling theory, and statistical tests, and by collecting the kinds of data adequate for performing such tests. The latter included not only ecological and functional analyses of artifacts, ranging from lithics (Davis 1978) to ceramics (Arnold 1985), but also analysis of “ecofacts” such as animal bones and plant remains. This trend accelerated greatly after the discovery of flotation techniques in the late 1960s that made the collection of the full range of ecofactual material, particularly plant material, much easier (Struever 1968a). Such ecofactual analysis also received emphasis in the work of contemporary British archaeologists such as Eric Higgs and his students, descendants of the earlier work of Grahame Clark at Cambridge, who applied that data widely in the study of European economic prehistory (Higgs 1972, 1975).
The way in which these data were put to use varied between the Binfordian and Higgsian models of ecological archaeology. The Higgs school emphasized geographical approaches such as site catchment analysis (Higgs and Vita-Finzi 1972) and central place theory, with the former applied primarily to band and tribal-level societies and the latter to chiefdom and state-level societies. Some American archaeologists became adherents to these approaches, while others considered them simplistic and too site-oriented. The predominant American approach became linking ecological concepts to systems theory, either in developing concepts of static, synchronic subsistence-settlement systems (Struever 1968b), in which individual archaeological sites were only components of larger systems, or to focus more explicitly on ethnographic analogy, using ecological factors as the basis of drawing such analogical relations. Ethnographic analogy from extant hunter-gatherers was used to demonstrate the validity of these ecologically based hypotheses, although with some realization that the hunters of the past were not the hunters of the present (Lee and DeVore 1968), and that the appropriateness of the analogy varied by the closeness of the environmental situation as well as the ethnic relationship of the past and present populations. Much of this analogical reasoning was made possible by an expanded database in cultural anthropology, with quantitative studies of hunter-gatherers being undertaken by Richard Lee and others with materialist biases.
This ecological positivist thinking in archaeology began to run into some opposition from a number of fronts in the 1970s, and came to a head with the subsidence of the fervor of the New Archaeology in the early 1980s. A number of factors were probably responsible for shifting paradigms in ecological thinking at that time: the admitted intellectual excesses of the New Archaeology; a realization that the taphonomic factors that structured the archaeological record must be considered before ecological relations can be established; the development of critical analysis of remnant hunter-gatherer societies as political constructs of the modern world; the rise of sociobiological thinking in other social sciences; and a changing political climate that increasingly shifted the funding of archaeology away from research grants driven by theoretical considerations, largely ecological, to cultural resource management. Ironically, although it was the environmental movement that gave rise to much of the concern about ecology and demography in social science thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, it was the cultural resource laws spawned by that movement that helped to shift priorities away from ecologically positivist, theory-driven archaeology. In the 1990s, this trend away from materialistic thinking was accelerated by the passage of repatriation laws that encouraged the development of indigenous, etic views of cultural development.
Binford’s (1977) initial corrective adjustment from the attempt to derive adaptive laws of human behavior, coined “middle-range theory,” eschewed the previous ethnographic analogy in archaeology in favor of assessing the nature of ecological processes operant in the patterning of subsistence and settlement in both ancient and modern frameworks, and using the former to gain insight into the latter. Later, in the 1980s, others challenged even that correction; in the development of post-processual archaeology, ecological and materialist phenomena were given a back seat to sociopolitical, cognitive, and ideological factors in structuring the archaeological record, or were linked to such factors through more complex interactions.
After this midcourse theoretical correction, ecological theory in archaeology essentially broke down into a number of methodological and/or theoretical camps, none of which are mutually exclusive, and many of which overlap considerably:
• Environmentalarchaeology, focusing on the use of animal bones, plant remains, and other organic materials from archaeological sites, as well as some geoarchaeological data, to reconstruct past human environments, as well as to reconstruct many aspects of ancient subsistence, settlement patterns, and adaptive coping strategies. This category might also include functional studies of lithic or other artifacts, and/or dwellings and other features, using archaeological or replicative objects, to provide data about the same topics. It might also include ethnoarchaeological data focusing on similar concerns. Although environmental archaeology provides a database for discussion about both environmental influence on humans and vice versa, neither are usually explicitly addressed.
• Traditional ecological archaeology, focusing on the use of concepts central to the synthetic body of ecological method and theory, such as limiting factors, niche theory, and biogeographical theory (including island biogeographical theory), but also with relatively little emphasis on cultural process.
• Socioecological theory in archaeology, focusing on ecological determinants of human behavior. This approach has used a wide range of methodologies, including linear programming and graph theory, but has predominantly focused on the application of optimal foraging theory in archaeology, particularly in the form of decision making related to diet and mobility patterns.
• Humanimpact on environments, focusing on both catastrophic and long-term human impacts, as reflected by ecofactual but also artifactual data, with additional insights gained from ethnohistoric data and ethnoarchaeological studies.
• Evolutionary archaeology and Darwinian archaeology, or at least that portion of these approaches that focus on ecological correlates of cultural transmission and the feedback linkages between human activities and environmental change.
• Interfacesbetween archaeology and political ecology, in which the use of natural resources, or the impact on natural resources by premodern societies, are considered within the context of sociopolitical relations. These approaches mirror a more recent shift within cultural ecology toward emphasis on political economy and the embeddedness of contemporary indigenous communities within nation-states.
• Interfaces between archaeology, ecology, and cognition, in which the utilization of natural resources, or the impact on natural resources by premodern societies, is considered within the context of belief systems and ideologies, focusing on individual and group decision making, and the manipulation of cultural symbols reflecting ecological interrelationships.
Of these approaches, environmental archaeology tends to be the least theoretically driven, although this has largely depended on the practitioner. Although the earliest applications of ecological approaches in archaeology can be traced to the zoologist Steensrup associated with the Danish shell midden project as early as 1848, most of the impetus for modern approaches began with the work of Grahame Clark. Clark’s pioneering studies used faunal remains to reconstruct and discuss subsistence studies in archaeology; others began to use plant remains for similar purposes, particularly after the development of flotation techniques. At first, these analyses appeared primarily as appendixes in site reports, but with the advent of processual archaeology, they became much more extensive, sophisticated, and quantitative.
European applications of environmental archaeology have traditionally focused more on paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstruction than on human adaptation to or manipulation of ancient environments. The study of faunal remains offers a good example. The European approach, often termed “archaeozoology,” has focused on the presence or absence of animals as indicators of environmental change, and physiological/evolutionary response of animal populations to environmental change as revealed in biometrics. The questions asked, and the hypotheses tested, have been essentially zoological rather than archaeological (Clason 1975). In contrast, the American approach, often termed “zooarchaeology,” has focused on the presence or absence of animals as indicators of hunting strategies, along with a variety of other indicators of such strategies, as well as how these strategies have shifted over time as revealed in the stratigraphic record. The questions asked, and the hypotheses tested, have been essentially archaeological, at least in the sense of processual archaeology (Binford 1977). There has been some middle ground, however; both approaches, for example, have focused on the reconstruction of the season of site occupation using animal presence or absence, or bioindicators such as annual and subannual incremental structures in animal tissues (Pike-Tay 2001; Rocek and Bar-Yosef 1998; Pals and van Wijngaarden-Bakker 1998). Both have made use of highly quantitative methodologies. Similar divergences can be seen in the study of plant remains from archaeological sites, although in general the study of microscopic plant remains (pollen and phytoliths) has been used more for reconstructing paleoenvironments, while the study of macrobotanical remains (nut and seed fragments), usually placed under the category of paleoethnobotany, has been used for reconstructing human-plant environmental interaction (Hastorf and Popper 1988). There are many exceptions to this, however; pollen from maize plants in the southwestern United States resulted from human environmental manipulation, while carbonized chenopod seeds from midwestern sites reflect both what the wind blew into campfires and what people consciously collected; wood fragments in archaeological sites are clearly produced by both natural and cultural agencies (King 1984).
Before the advent of the New Archaeology, the study of organic remains in archaeology had been largely limited to species lists and the inferences that could be drawn from them. Afterward, the insistence on quantification for testing hypotheses concerning human environmental adaptation engendered a whole new suite of approaches. For example, data on animal species and skeletal part frequencies could be used to assess the relative subsistence importance of different taxa, and to reconstruct human hunting strategies. Similarly, age and sex data for different animal species could be used to assess the nature of species-specific hunting strategies, and in addition age and sex-specific mortality data could be used to construct survivorship curves for animal taxa and assess the impact of human exploitation on animal populations (Styles 1981; Hudson 1983). Such approaches have become increasingly important over time as ecological theory in archaeology has shifted from a focus on environmental reconstruction and adaptation to human environmental impact and socioeconomic issues (Ford 2001; Rowley-Conwy 2000).
Recently, there has been a renewed interested in using zooarchaeology and paleobotany for the purposes of Holocene paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental reconstruction in conjunction with the growing popularity of seeking analogs to modern climate change and global warming and examining their impacts on human societies (Rogers 2004; Redman et al. 2004). There has been particular focus on reconstructing and determining the effects of the Younger Dryas, the Hypsithermal, the Neoglacial, the Medieval Optimum, and the Little Ice Age periods (McGovern et al. 1988; Gutzler 2000; McIntosh et al. 2000; Hassan 2000; Fagan 2001, 2004; Grayson and Delpech 2005; Yesner and Crowell 2006). Geoarchaeological data have also contributed to the reconstruction of Holocene sea-level history and the history of climatic phenomena such as El Niño (Sandweiss et al. 1996) in relation to these paleoclimatic events (Fagan 1999). Catastrophe theory has had some influence here, with a number of studies focused on the importance of short-term catastrophic events on human societies (Bawden and Reycraft 2000; McKoy and Heikern 2000; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002). Linkages have been suggested between such catastrophic climatic events and economic crises underlying the origins of agriculture in the ancient Near East (Bar Yosef 1998) and its delayed adoption in north-temperate Eurasia (Akazawa 1981, 1982; Rowley-Conwy 1984; Yesner and Popov 2002). The value of fine-grained, long-term, stratigraphically isolated paleoecological records from archaeological sites for the reconstruction of environmental change and human impact has been recognized by numerous investigators. The importance of such archaeoecological data and their interpretation for wildlife managers, climate modelers, and others is now being increasingly acknowledged (Lyman and Cannon 2004). Unfortunately, the use of faunal and botanical records, in particular, for establishing paleoecological baselines requires disentangling the meaning of shifting species frequencies from the results of human environmental manipulation, which still presents many methodological difficulties.
Four recent synthetic treatments of the field of environmental archaeology include those of Branch et al. (2005), Wilkinson and Stevens (2003), Dincauze (2000), and Evans and O’Connor (1999). Earlier, still useful treatments, are by Shackley (1981, 1985), Evans (1978), and Butzer (1971). Numerous case studies have appeared, of which two particularly useful compendia are Reitz et al. (1996) and Luff and Rowley-Conwy (1994).
Traditional ecological archaeology has attempted to apply to archaeology a suite of basic ecological concepts, many of which date to the modern ecological synthesis of Odum, MacArthur, Whittaker, and others in the 1940s through 1970s. Among the concepts applied have been limiting factors that structure human settlement patterns, often derived from ethnographic analogy or ethnoarchaeology. Recent compendia have focused on ecosystemic archaeology utilizing limiting factors as a central focus, such as water stress in desert environments (Veth et al. 2005). Biogeographical theory has also been applied to a variety of societies, including most recently the early peopling of the Americas (Barton et al. 2004). As a subset of this theory, the theory of island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Simberloff 1973) has had powerful application in many areas, including the design of modern indigenous reserves and wildlife parks. But its main application in archaeology has been to understand the process of species isolation and recolonization, and its potential impact on human foragers. Grayson (1987) has applied such theory to Great Basin foragers, and I have applied it (Yesner 1998) to eastern Aleut foragers.
Ecological concepts involving predator-prey relations and food web theory have also been employed in archaeological explanation, beginning in the late 1970s. For example, complex food web interactions involving humans and other species, especially when humans compete with one or more of their prey species for a third food item, have been used to explain cyclical shifts in abundance of vertebrate and invertebrate animal remains in coastal archaeological sites. Examples of this involve humans, sea otters, and sea urchin populations in aboriginal Alaska (Yesner 1977; Simenstad et al. 1978) and coastal California (Erlandson et al. 2005), and humans, California sheephead, and shellfish (Salls 1995). Such complex, multispecies food webs are typical of coastal environments, especially in northern and temperate zones. They are often subjected to smaller amplitudes, but greater frequencies of species fluctuations (May 1973), and these effects may be exacerbated by the additional role of humans as predators within such food webs (Yesner and Gray 1975). Successful human populations faced with such situations develop the technoeconomic and/or sociopolitical responses, including overlapping aspects of information collection, environmental management, resource intensification, resource redistribution, external trade relations, and ritual responses, that enable continued survival, with individual actors promoting such solutions (see under “Political Ecology” below). As a result, such populations have been the basis for arguments appealing to the application of resilience theory (Holling 1973), sustainability theory (Tainter 2000), and biocomplexity theory (Adams 1978) in archaeology, which has found common ground with some theoretical positions concerning resilience and sustainability of indigenous populations in contemporary cultural anthropology.
Extensive use has also been made of niche theory from general ecology, particularly by Donald Hardesty (1975, 1980), who has applied the concept to the breadth of both dietary and landscape use through the application of diversity measures. I also applied the concept in analyzing both prehistoric resource use at different site locations in the eastern Aleutian Islands (Yesner 1977; Yesner and Aigner 1976), and more recently in examining the differences in subsistence patterns between initial colonists and later occupants of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska (Yesner 2000). Allied concepts of species packing and niche overlap (May and MacArthur 1972) lead to considerations of partitioning and competition over resources by human populations. However, description is not explanation, which has led to significant disagreements on what meaning to derive from increasing or decreasing niche width. For example, while decreasing niche width among Eurasian Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers has long been used to suggest increasing specialization (Mellars 1973; Mellars and Stringer 1989), particularly in the hunting of reindeer (caribou), Grayson and Delpech (2003, 2005) have suggested that such patterns may be explainable by environmental change alone. In this view, a parsimonious argument would be to establish environmental correlates before suggesting human manipulation as the basis of these data. Perhaps an overall statement concerning the application of niche theory in archaeology would be that it exemplifies the diversity of resource opportunities, including both exploitable taxa and microhabitats, available to and acquired by foragers within a given region.
Beginning in the 1970s, some archaeologists sought to explain resource use patterns and settlement locations as an attempt to optimize a series of dietary constraints and related variables. Although not informed by broader theory, early attempts used graphic solutions (Hill 1971; Green 1980) or linear programming methods (Reidhead 1979; Keene 1980, 1981) to interpret site locations as optimizing distances to critical resources (defined in terms of energy or nutrients). However, by the early 1980s, these approaches were affected by the development of the field of sociobiology, spearheaded by Wilson (1975). Sociobiological theory generated a search for sets of animal and human behaviors which could be keyed directly to Darwinian fitness through genetically mediated factors. Most of the early applications in anthropology were to such areas as altruism or paternity certainty, which could be confidently related to kin selection. However, in archaeology the main impact was in looking at diet and mobility patterns of prehistoric hunter-gatherers through the eyes of optimal foraging theory, first discussed in several contributions in “Hunter-gatherer Foraging Strategies” (Winterhalder and Smith 1981). The basic principle of optimal foraging theory (OFT) was that human subsistence patterns should be found to optimize the return rate (ratio of energy produced to energy expended) in the exploitation of natural resources (including search, immobilization, retrieval, and processing). This was based on the assumption that, all other things being equal, energy maximization (or optimization) leads to increased survival, reproduction, and provisioning of offspring. As a result, OFT was characterized as a correlate of Darwinian selection, but its applications have focused more on behavior than on genetics. It owes as much to Charnov’s (1976) marginal value theorem (bioeconomic or microeconomic theory) as it does to biological theory (MacArthur and Pianka 1966; Emlen 1973). Thus the application of OFT to archaeology, replacing earlier atheoretical linear programming approaches, is more properly labeled socioecology than sociobiology. Initial applications of OFT were synchronic and focused on the reconstruction of dietary breadth and diet selection among prehistoric hunter-gatherers (Yesner 1981), as well as settlement patterns. Many of these early applications were essentially tests of the fundamental but somewhat counterintuitive proposition of OFT that optimal diets are predicted only by the abundance of highly ranked resources (i.e., those that provide high return rates per unit of time or energy invested); lower-ranked resources will never be utilized, no matter how abundant, as long as the abundance of higher-ranked resources remains high. Although contemporary hunter-gatherers provided only limited tests of this proposition, archaeological data provided increasing verification.
Later applications of OFT moved toward explaining diachronic changes in the use of resources, linking them in some cases with the replacement of populations by others with superior resource extraction patterns. For example, increasing aridity during the mid-Holocene period in the Great Basin region of the western United States was linked to an increase in small seed utilization, reflected by an increase in the use of grinding stones, and eventually the expansion of Numic peoples who developed such technologies to a superior degree (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982, 1983; Simms 1987). Another example is from the High Arctic region, where the increased availability of bowhead whales during the Medieval Optimum allowed the intensification of bowhead exploitation; Thule peoples, who developed the requisite technology and socioeconomic organization for hunting the bowheads displaced the generalized hunter-gatherers of the Dorset tradition who previously occupied that terrain (Yesner 2004). More generally, OFT methods have been used to assess a wide variety of cases for resource intensification, the increased use of potentially high-return but often high-cost resources such as anadromous fish or large sea mammals that require significant additional labor for processing (Lourandos 1985; Bagsall 1987; Boughey 1987; Beaton 1991; Broughton 1999; Kopperl 2003; Yesner 2004; cf. Charnov et al. 1976). This tends to take place in environments that will support resource intensification, particularly coastal environments, and under conditions (resource depression, competition) that stimulate such processes through cultural (including sociopolitical) mechanisms. Eventually OFT explanations were applied to larger cases, such as the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna and the concomitant shift toward the use of a broader spectrum of resources, leading eventually to the origins of agriculture. OFT explanations have had considerable theoretical power because of their significant success in such retrodictive explanations.
Not all aspects of OFT applications in archaeology have been successful, however. OFT has failed to explain some aspects of resource intensification, such as the willingness of societies to undertake high technological and social costs for exploiting high-return resources such as bowhead whales (Yesner 2004), or mass harvesting of abundant but individually low-return fish, bird, or small mammal resources. OFT has also been difficult to apply to seasonal, annual, or longer-term resource fluctuations. Finally, although game theory and other approaches have been applied to agricultural or mixed hunting/agricultural societies, OFT has been rarely applied to these societies in spite of its potential applicability (Yesner and Popov 2002), mostly because of the theoretical problems in integrating socioeconomic change with foraging patterns. It should also be noted that socioecological and particularly sociobiological approaches have made limited inroads into cultural anthropological theory more broadly; to the extent such approaches are applied in archaeology they enhance the divergence between archaeology and cultural anthropology.
While both traditional ecological archaeology and socioecological archaeology have focused on the impact of environments and environmental constraints on human societies, studies of human environmental impact have reversed that arrow of causation. Outside archaeology, studies of paleoclimatic change and its impact on human societies have received much less attention in the social sciences than have studies of human impact on the environment. Although the latter was a popular subject in human geography in the early twentieth century (Thomas 1956), in archaeology it was first applied to farming and herding societies in the ancient Near East, beginning in the 1950s (Jacobsen and Adams 1958). Such concerns became more widespread in archaeological theory after the advent of the environmental movement in the 1970s, and by the 1980s were beginning to be applied not only to complex, agriculturally based societies but to smaller-scale hunter-gatherer societies as well. Human environmental impact became increasingly viewed as a long-term phenomenon beginning with the adoption of fire by Middle Paleolithic humans (Stiner 1991). In part, this was the result of the recognition that human societies are to be viewed less as monolithic ecological types (hunter-gatherers, farmers, herders) than as entities on a sliding scale of technological and sociopolitical complexity. Hunter-gatherers began to be recognized as practicing widespread environmental manipulation, in some cases verging on quasi-agriculture, in a number of disparate environments (e.g., Australia, California, Pacific Northwest Coast, Columbia-Fraser plateau, North American Subarctic). Special concerns developed concerning the role of humans in faunal extinction in both ancient and modern times (Diamond 1984; Klein 1992). Evidence of the use of fire, land clearance, and other practices were assayed not only on faunal and botanical remains but also on artifacts, dwellings, sites, and landscapes (Butzer 1982; Turner et al. 1990; Jacobson and Firor 1992; Redman 1999). When combined with written records and other sources of data, these approaches have been linked to a larger field of historical ecology (Kirch and Hunt 2001; Crumley 1994; Steadman and Mead 1995; Russell 1997; Ballee 1998).
A special subcategory of this field has been applied to maritime hunter-gatherers, long recognized as a special subset of hunter-gatherers (Yesner 1980) because of differences in population levels, technological complexity (Oswalt 1979), and sociopolitical complexity. Zooarchaeological data have been used to assess the impacts of complex hunter-gatherers on their resource base, by examining the age structure of populations of shellfish, fish, and sea mammals. Studies of what is often termed the resource depression hypothesis have met their greatest success in examining human impact on shellfish populations (Botkin 1982; Yesner 1984), but the meaning of this impact is unclear, since it can be very localized in extent and simply require the movement of groups to alternative sites. Studies on fish and bird populations in Polynesia, including New Zealand (Shawcross 1972) and Hawaii (Steadman 1995; Kirch and Hunt 2001), have met some success, while impacts on sea mammal populations (Yesner 1989; Jones et al. 2004) are often suggestive but more difficult to establish with certainty. Nevertheless, such data have recently been marshaled to demonstrate the long-term impact of humans on coral reefs (Pandolfi et al. 2003), on kelp beds (Steneck et al. 2002), and on fisheries more generally (Jackson et al. 2001).
Explanations for resource depression (or shifts in species abundance more generally) have appealed to a wide variety of ecological as well as nonecological hypotheses. An example of this is the late prehistoric decline of deer populations in various areas of Native North America. In the 1970s, under the influence of processual archaeology, faunal analysts attributed such declines (observed in age ratios of archaeological deer bones) to human population growth and overexploitation of deer populations; similar approaches were later taken to human impacts on deer populations in Japan (Koike and Ohtaishi 1983). In the 1980s, these explanations were given fuller form with the application of optimal foraging theory, although some argued that the depression of deer populations around Mississippian and Iroquoian centers was better explained as the result of intensification of deer hide acquisition for both subsistence and trade (Starna 1983). Recently two other hypotheses have been added: ones focused on the impact of climate change between the Middle and Late Holocene periods on deer populations (Broughton and Bayham 2003), and others focused on an increasingly important prestige value of hunting large game in the Late Holocene period, at least partially a consequence of changing climate and growing human population densities (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002). The latter approach follows the show-off sociobiological hypothesis of Kristen Hawkes (1991). To date, these arguments have remained largely unresolved.
Although nominally based on Darwinian concepts, both socioecological approaches in archaeology and so-called evolutionary archaeology or Darwinian archaeology involve entirely different approaches (see Bentley et al., chapter 8). Although both are based on evolutionary concepts, evolutionary archaeology, through its insistence that by-products of human behavior (i.e., artifacts) can be viewed as phenotypic expressions of genetically based human behavioral traits, and thus are the focus of natural selection, involves little use of ecological correlates. It has a greater relationship to cultural transmission theory in human sociobiology as developed initially by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1980) and later by Boyd and Richerson (1985). The latter has had some limited applications in cultural anthropology (Hewlett and Cavalli-Sforza 1986), with applications in archaeology in their infancy (Mace et al. 2005). Applications in archaeology may be divided into two main schools.
The first is an artifact-oriented school, represented by U.S. scholars such as Dunnell, Lyman, O’Brien, Bettinger, Shott, and others, largely focused on trajectories in artifact utilization by societies over time (O’Brien 1996; Barton and Clark 1997). The second is a society-oriented school, represented by Maschner and Ames for northwestern North America (Maschner 1996) and Shennan in the United Kingdom (Shennan 1989; Mace et al. 2005), in which technological changes are linked to larger issues concerning the spread of ideas through diffusion or emulation, and are viewed within a context of manipulation of objects and people in a variety of economic, social, and ritual contexts by higher status individuals within more sociopolitically complex societies.
One valuable aspect of Darwinian archaeology is to unite some of the aspects of environmental impact on humans, and human impact on environments, that have tended to form separate schools. The work of David Rindos (1980) on human/environmental coevolution is an example of this. Earlier work by Flannery and others under a systems theory framework had demonstrated that human actions, such as the culling of plants with certain genetically based characters, led to the increased productivity of such plants, leading to greater experimentation and eventually domestication. Using a coevolutionary framework, Rindos more broadly demonstrated that Darwinian concepts could be used to characterize such interactions, much as they are within the biological world.
During the past twenty years, the development of post-processual theory in archaeology has increasingly impacted ecological analyses. This includes the expansion of traditional categories of archaeological analysis to include sociopolitical and cognitive frameworks. As noted above, the expansion of sociopolitical treatments in ecological archaeology, in particular, mirrors the development of political ecology within cultural anthropology, which links the environmental circumstances of indigenous populations with the political realities of contemporary nation-states.
Applications of political ecology to the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies have been relatively limited in scope. Particularly notable is Gilman’s (1984) application of Marxist theory to the Upper Paleolithic revolution, suggested as a theoretical middle ground between idealistic and purely materialistic explanations of the production of Upper Paleolithic art. Gilman argues that technological development and population growth among Upper Paleolithic groups would have triggered reduced necessity for intergroup trade relations or other socioeconomic obligations, resulting in “ritual/stylistic reinforcement of [intragroup] solidarity” reflected in the manufacture of Upper Paleolithic art. Others, however, have traced the florescence of U.P. art to population growth in other ways, suggesting that increased human population densities led in turn to increased territoriality, a consequent inability to obtain locally required resources (including stone for tool making as well as natural resources), a resulting necessity for increased population interaction to obtain the missing resources, an increase in status for individuals who managed that trade, and the development of symbols of group identity promoting solidarity in the face of these increasingly competitive interactions (White 1992), with the adoption of such symbols perhaps promoted by these status-seeking individuals. In a similar fashion, ecological factors, specifically a capability for surplus accumulation of storable fish or grain resources, have been seen as underlying the competitive aggrandizement linked to the achieved sociopolitical status and hierarchical power relations in complex hunter-gatherer and farming societies (Dietler and Hayden 2001).
Perhaps some of the best examples of such applications of political ecology in archaeology would be to more sociopolitically complex societies, such as Hastorf’s (1991a,b) late prehistoric Andean studies. In one such study, Hastorf (1991a) uses paleobotanical data to demonstrate that changes in wood use among late prehistoric Peruvians may be attributable as much to requirements for state-managed rituals and other purposes as for heat production, based on detailed analogies with the historical record of later Inka societies. In another study (Hastorf 1991b) she uses stable isotopic data from human remains to demonstrate gender differences in the manipulation and consumption of discrete food categories, inside and outside domestic spaces, resulting from different sociopolitical constraints on men’s and women’s activities.
Another area in which post-processual theory in archaeology has resulted in new trends in ecological approaches in archaeology is in the interface between ecology and cognition. Foremost in this area has been the discussions of Steve Mithen (1990) concerning the decision-making processes of “thoughtful foragers.” Again, one particular focus of analysis has been the ecological and cognitive processes underlying imagery in Upper Paleolithic art. Beginning in the early 1980s, such studies focused predominantly on the linkage between art and perception of the natural environment (Jochim 1982) or as markers for important economic and social places on the landscape (Conkey 1984), but increasingly ideas about socialization and cultural transmission have been employed in the explanation of U.P. art (Mithen 1989; Whitley 1994).
Related to this as a focus of analysis has been the development of so-called landscape archaeology, linking regional settlement pattern studies with natural environments and past ideological conceptions of those environments, often culturally or ethnically specific. In this subset of ecological archaeology, landscapes are seen not only as places where human-environmental interactions take place resulting from economic exploitation, but also as places imbued with cultural meanings springing from histories of human activities, social interactions, and cultural memories. The last of these would include ideological landscapes, in which ancestors and spirits engaged in activities in certain times and places in the past. It is in this arena that ethnographic and ethnohistoric research can make a powerful contribution to ecological archaeology, by revealing the cognitive maps of cultural memories and spiritual activities associated by indigenous peoples with their landscapes (Gould 1990). This research is linked to the focus on traditional or indigenous ecological knowledge in cultural anthropology, and is an area of increasing importance in both fields.
Finally, a potentially powerful aspect of political ecology in archaeology lies in the area of historical archaeology and postcontact transformations of subsistence and settlement patterns of indigenous societies. Organic remains from late prehistoric and historic sites, coupled with detailed examination of ethnohistoric records, may be used to establish whether, and to what extent, the decimation of indigenous societies by European contact resulted from the removal or destruction of traditional resources, especially those critical to marginal populations. An example of this is the removal of high-fat sea mammal resources from the Subantarctic region by European sealers and whalers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, creating miserable conditions and susceptibility to disease for Fuegian hunter-gatherers, eventually resulting in their decimation (Yesner 1993). In other cases, the decimation of indigenous populations may be due to introduced fauna, such as rats on Easter Island (T. Hunt, personal communication, 2005).
Ecology as a recognizable field of study began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as biology began to shift from a purely descriptive and taxonomically oriented field to a more process-oriented one, as concepts of natural selection and adaptation became clarified and new field studies became available. A similar transition began to occur in anthropology and other social sciences in the early twentieth century, and the study of ecological relationships formed an important part of new process-oriented perspectives. Ecological archaeology arose in conjunction with functionalist theory in cultural anthropology, at a time in which archaeology and anthropology were more theoretically aligned, particularly in the United States. Ecological approaches gained impetus in midcentury as a result of the development of techniques in faunal and floral analysis and the origin of multidisciplinary studies in archaeology. In the 1960s and 1970s, ecological concepts came to the fore, forming the core of processual (New) archaeology in terms of both method and theory. Methodologically, environmental archaeology developed as a field in which traditional functional analyses of artifacts and features were used alongside detailed studies of animal bones, plant remains, and other data to reconstruct paleoenvironments and their manipulation by human societies. Theoretically, ecological archaeology focused on the application of traditional ecological concepts such as limiting factors, ecological niches, and biogeographical distributions to human populations, and a systems approach pervading both the study of natural ecosystems and human societies. Although the major concern was with the impact of environments on the adaptations and transformations of human societies, increasingly the impact of humans on environments became of interest. In the past twenty-five years, a number of new theoretical approaches have appeared, some owing more to biology, especially sociobiology and bioeconomics (socioecological and neo-Darwinian approaches), while still others focus more on culture than on nature (cognitive and political ecology approaches). Predicting future trends in this important subdiscipline of archaeology is difficult, but in the short term increasing technological sophistication should lead to refinements in methodology, in which increasing information about human ecological relations will be obtained from archaeological data, and perhaps some rapprochement between theoretical approaches to human-environmental relations derived from these data sets.
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