1

Archaeologies of Political Ecology –

Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
Christopher T. Morehart
Arizona State University, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
John K. Millhauser
North Carolina State University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
and
Santiago Juarez
Colgate University, Department of Anthropology

ABSTRACT
The theoretical and methodological toolkits developed under political ecology have become increasingly relevant
in current discussions of environmental impacts, sustainability, and inequality. We developed this volume to identify
the unique perspectives that archaeologists offer to the field of political ecology. The archaeology of political
ecology is founded on a long and diverse history focused on issues relating to environments, the human–nature
relationship, ontology, property, power, and inequality. We outline this history to demonstrate that political ecology
and archaeology inform one another through shared interests and research foci. More importantly, we highlight
how the two fields can and do benefit through their partnership. Ultimately this volume serves as an invitation
for interdisciplinary research that aims to better elucidate the complexities and nuances of human–environmental
interaction. [Archaeology, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Landscapes]

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no provide directions for future research. Consequently, po-
means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign litical ecology requires an approach that is both inter-
people. disciplinary and historical to trace the intersecting move-
Friedrich Engels (1975 [1876], 14)
ments of people, places, and things across time and space.
We argue in this volume not simply that archaeologists
P olitical ecology sharpens understandings of human-
environmental interaction across space and time. Tra-
ditionally defined as the study of cultural ecology with
need political ecology. More urgently, we assert that polit-
ical ecology needs archaeology. Archaeologists’ ability to
the tool kit of political economy, political ecology has reconstruct historical processes in relation to the materiality
developed to articulate unequal relations with multiple of landscapes, places, institutions, and things is fundamental
organizational, discursive, representational, and material to an effective political ecology. Without these frameworks,
processes and phenomena (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; methods, and scales of analysis, political ecologists’ ability
Escobar 1999; Paulson et al. 2005; Peet and Watts 1996; to speak authoritatively on topics of resilience, sustainabil-
Robbins 2012; Rocheleau 1999). Different methods, foci ity, marginalization, and degradation is limited. Archaeology
of interest, as well as epistemologies now are common in also offers critical time scales necessary to project responsi-
political ecological research. Political ecologists include bly into the future. Engagement with work by political ecol-
materialists, post-structuralists, feminists, activists, and, in- ogists can help archaeologists clarify their understandings
creasingly, post-humanists. Debates and mutual criticisms of the organizational and institutional relations that structure
Volume editors: John K. Millhauser, Christopher T. Morehart, and Santiago Juarez, Volume 29: Uneven Terrain: Archaeologies of Political
Ecology
ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Vol. 29, pp. 5–29, ISSN 1551-823X,
online ISSN 1551-8248. C 2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/apaa.12097.
6 Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
individuals’ (both human and nonhuman) positions in
broader worlds and can help to complicate and historicize en-
during dichotomies, such as that of “nature versus culture.”
Archaeology and political ecology stand to benefit by
applying the strengths of each discipline to questions of com-
mon interest. To this end, the papers in this volume reflect
the spatial, temporal, and cultural breadth and strengths of a
combined archaeological and political ecological approach.
Contributions focus especially on environmental inequal-
ity, the connections between property and power, ecological
deterioration and marginalization, and the short-term and
long-term consequences of environmental crises on the so-
cial fabric. We have organized this volume to present po-
litical ecology as an under-utilized yet powerful venue for
archaeological research.
In order to frame the diversity of perspectives within
political ecology, we begin this introduction by outlining
its intellectual foundations. We present multiple ancestral
roots to describe the variety of perspectives that led to to-
day’s political ecology. We deliberately develop this narra-
tive through the lens of anthropology to offer a statement of
our field’s genealogy that demonstrates its centrality to the
goals of political ecology. We then examine major themes in
contemporary political ecology, which offer critical perspec-
tives on development theory, understandings of landscapes
and livelihoods, inequality, and, increasingly, the relational
nature of politics and ecologies. Finally, we discuss where
archaeology and political ecology can find common ground.
We suggest several areas where archaeologists may benefit
by incorporating political ecology into their investigations
and summarize how the contributions to this volume exem-
plify this effort.
Genealogy of Political Ecology
Political ecology is not new. It has an important and sub-
stantive genealogy. Greenberg and Park (1994, 1) observed
in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Political Ecology
that political ecology “is a historical outgrowth of the cen-
tral questions asked by the social sciences about the relations
between human society, viewed in its bio-cultural-political
complexity, and a significantly humanized nature.” Political
ecology offers a collaborative framework for scholars of dif-
ferent fields, epistemologies, and ontological orientations to-
ward politics and ecology (Robbins 2012). Our background
as anthropologists informs our perspectives on political ecol-
ogy. We recognize the major contributions from closely re-
lated disciplines, including geography and sociology. But
our genealogy is specifically tailored to anthropology. Here
we discuss foundational treatises in political economy; early
anthropological conceptualizations of culture, institutions,
and environments; cultural ecology’s reframing of culture
itself; and anthropology as a historically oriented field.
From political economy to anthropology
A common and productive orientation stresses political
ecology as cultural ecology, or how people (or “cultures”)
adapt to their environments, studied with the toolkit of po-
litical economy, or the differential distribution of wealth
and power (e.g., Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Greenberg
and Park 1994; Paulson et al. 2005, 17; Peet and Watts
1996; Rice 2013; Robbins 2012). The articulation of en-
vironmental and political economic theories should be of
little surprise. The origins of political economy in Western
philosophical thought are markedly environmental, espe-
cially in terms of power and property. The political philoso-
phers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are indicative. For
example, a specific understanding of nature, power, and pol-
itics shaped Hobbes’ view of the sovereign. Power (or, as
Hobbes also refers to it, force) was political only insofar
as it was channeled and mobilized through institutions. Na-
ture was a world of pure power. Lacking the institutional
apparatus necessary to channel this power into politics, the
commonwealth was impossible, and life in the state of nature
was “brutish and short” (Hobbes 1909 [1651], 99), devoid
of industry, commerce, culture, and also of property. The
creation of property (or propriety), in Hobbes view, was one
of the first acts or institutional creations of the sovereign that
shielded humans from nature while simultaneously produc-
ing political subjects (e.g., Hobbes 1909 [1651], 189–90).
Property for Locke, in contrast, was the product of human
labor. Labor, once expended, transformed a part of nature
into something uniquely human (Locke 1980 [1689], 20).
But property existed both in a state of nature and in civil
society (Dumont 1986, 81). Civil society, in Locke’s view,
was built upon a social contract that protected individuals’
rights to property—to humanized nature.
That political economists viewed either the creation or
the protection of property as one of the original political
acts is relevant to contemporary political ecology. Property,
labor, taxation, surplus, and rent—phenomena directly artic-
ulated with the environment (i.e., land)—are core elements
of the political economics of Adam Smith and Karl Marx,
among others (Wrigley 2010). Both Smith and Marx, for
instance, maintained a view of labor as a process that trans-
formed and humanized nature. For Smith ([1776] 1991), this
transformation was a “natural” process; societies could be
compared in terms of how efficiently their social structures
(i.e., governments) impeded or facilitated the transformative
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
process of investment, extraction, accumulation, and trade.
In Marx’s work, there exists a critical view of the evolu-
tion of political economic relations and a coherent vision
of the transformation of power across history and society,
from physical force to social power to the power attributed to
things (both commodities and money) (Marx 1973 [1858],
157). Labor is the common thread, or force, that connects the
material environment to the social structures and ideologies
of society and back again via the production of things and
the objectification of the relations they appear to embody
(see also discussions in Adams 1975; Harvey 1974; Sahlins
1972). Unlike other Classical political economists, however,
Marx framed the labor process as a contingent thread, shaped
by historically variable social relations of production. Marx,
in other words, re-articulated property and power via the
mechanisms of inequality and exploitation—consequences
of political economic relationships that were not immedi-
ately incorporated into early understandings of culture and
society, especially in North American anthropology.
From culture to cultural ecology
In the first decades of anthropology as a discipline,
anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic criticized de-
velopmental evolutionism and environmental determinism
(what was called anthropogeography). Boas (1928, 239–40)
referred to this form of reasoning as geographical determin-
ism, meaning that “the geographical environment controls
the development of culture. . . . [E]conomic conditions of
life shape all manifestations of early culture and of com-
plex civilization.” Boas, and especially his student Alfred
Kroeber, emphasized multi-causal cultural and historical
explanations for human behavior and organizational struc-
ture: “institutions . . . must be always affected but never
controlled by nature” (Kroeber 1908, 285). Boas and his
students frequently are characterized as rejecting the impor-
tance of human-land relationships outright (see discussion in
Speth 1978). Their research stressed the need to understand
“culture” on its own terms, sui generis. Over the long-term,
however, recognizing the integration of both human and en-
vironmental relationships paradoxically depended (to an ex-
tent, at least) on this rejection of environmental-geographical
determinism.
Indeed, on the other side of the Atlantic, European soci-
ologists and anthropologists (untethered to the culture con-
cept) were building an integrated understanding of the in-
stitutional nexus through which people interact with their
environment. Mauss, carrying the Durkheimian banner, crit-
icized the simplicity of environmental determinism. Anthro-
pogeographers, he argued, assigned to the environment “a
7
kind of perfect efficacy, as if land were capable of producing
effects on its own without interacting with other factors that
might reinforce or neutralize its effects either partially or
entirely” (Mauss 2009 [1904], 158). Similarly, Malinowski
stressed that environmental interaction took place via insti-
tutional dynamics. Among the Trobrianders, for example, he
argued that production, distribution, and exchange revolved
around social hierarchy and, particularly, the organizational
power of the chief (Malinowski 1921).
In post-World War II North American anthropology,
thinking historically also required re-framing culture. Cul-
ture and artifacts were not to be considered purely mental
constructs or their material reflections but, instead, mech-
anisms by which society adapted to the environment (e.g.,
Binford 1962, 218; White 1959, 8; see also Kirch 1980,
105). This approach offered the ability to examine human–
environmental interaction and also historical change, a view
that re-asserted archaeology as relevant to the goals of
a transforming, unified anthropology. Due to their focus
on ecological adaptation, major ecological anthropologists,
such as Julian Steward, Marvin Harris, and Roy Rappaport,
often are construed to be hyper-determinists who saw other
dimensions of culture as either irrelevant or epiphenomenal.
While true in part, their scholarship is not simply a return to
nineteenth-century anthropogeography plus evolutionism.
Steward, for example, was critical of mentalist views of
culture, but he was also Kroeber’s student. Hence, he (e.g.,
1955) argued that non-adaptive, “secondary features” that do
not fall into the culture core, what Geertz (1963, 7) referred
to as “the rest of culture,” require different explanatory ap-
paratuses. Although epiphenomena, they were significant
elements of society that could not be explained exclusively
in reference to the environment (Robbins 2012, 39; see also
Friedman 1987, 110). Nevertheless, Steward’s political en-
gagement has also been strongly criticized (see Friedman
1987; Patterson 1987): his evolutionary views justified de-
velopmental policies of assimilation for Native Americans;
he was an agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and he
testified on behalf of the government in Native American
land claims.
Harris (1979) also disregarded non-material processes
as epiphenomena. His “crude” materialism (see Friedman
1974) assigned causal primacy to environmental and in-
frastructural dimensions of society. Importantly, however,
Harris wrote during a time of developmental policies in the
global South following World War II, which laid the blame
for under-development on the apparently irrational behav-
ior of the global poor (see below). Harris condemned this
notion and instead portrayed cultural practices in the under-
developed world as highly rational, ecological adaptations
(see Harris 1966).
8 Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
Ecological anthropologists were beginning to note the
negative impact of the West on the rest. Rappaport (1967)
sought to create a model where nothing was epiphenome-
nal through his work with the Tsembaga of Highland New
Guinea. He viewed the Tsembaga system as a well-adapted,
albeit closed one, compared to the excess and detrimen-
tal positive feedbacks characteristic of modern, industrial
society. Rappaport condemned what he termed Ecologi-
cal Imperialism: “It may not be improper to characterize
as ecological imperialism the elaboration of a world or-
ganization that is centered in industrial societies and de-
grades the ecosystems of the agrarian societies it absorbs”—
a process he argued was “masked by . . . euphemisms,
among which ‘progress’ and ‘development’ are prominent”
(Rappaport 1971, 80). In short, despite the deterministic as-
pects of their research and findings, much of which can be
or has been criticized, the work of these three influential
cultural ecologists exhibits salient political dimensions rel-
evant to understand anthropology’s eventual collision with
political ecology.
From cultural ecology to political ecology
A genealogy of political ecology, therefore, should rec-
ognize that ecological social sciences and environmental
history developed when scholars were beginning to ques-
tion the role of the West in a nominally post-colonial but
increasingly global political economy. Indeed, one of the
first uses of the term “political ecology” was that of French
philosopher de Jouvenel. He recognized the negative en-
vironmental consequences for underdeveloped countries as
they became incorporated into Western political economies
whose power to extract and tax is “also a power to de-
stroy” (de Jouvenel 1957, 291), a sentiment that foreshadows
Rappaport’s.
With social evolutionary theory, particularly strands
influenced by Neo-Marxism, came the recognition of the
present as both the culmination and the continuation of
histories built on political relationships among differen-
tially positioned people. Social scientists and historians be-
gan to rethink the areas where they historically worked:
the global South. Anthropology’s growing historical con-
sciousness can be captured by Mills’ (1959) notion of the
“sociological imagination.” He stressed a need to situate
local lives within the currents of broader historical circum-
stances, a task that is dependent on the self-awareness of the
observer or researcher. Several intellectual developments
in historical political economy—such as French Annales
history, Dependency theory, and World-Systems theory—
also influenced this project by emphasizing that colonialism
and the modern age have been built upon unequal, depen-
dent relationships and have produced a stratified global po-
litical economy (e.g., Braudel 1972; Gunder Frank 1966;
Hobsbawm 2002; Wallerstein 1974; Worsley 1964).
Political ecology depended on a departure from viewing
culture only as an adaptive mechanism and from conceiving
“cultures” as isolated, self-enclosed entities. Echoing ear-
lier European anthropologists, scholars began to view hu-
man adaptation to the environment as conditioned by insti-
tutional relationships, especially those governing property.
Wolf’s (1972) brief paper, entitled “Ownership and Political
Ecology,” provided a skeletal summary of this idea, particu-
larly in reference to a collection of studies on Swiss Alpine
communities. Households, he argued, seek “a balance be-
tween unimpeded access to an effective combination of
resources . . . and the operation of the jural rules concern-
ing who owns what” (Wolf 1972, 201). Significantly, these
jural rules are not simply traits or static norms of a cul-
ture to be elicited and abstracted “but mechanisms which
mediate between the pressures emanating from the larger
society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem” (Wolf
1972, 202). Wolf’s work moved toward global, historical re-
lations rather than evolutionary types (see Friedman 1987,
110). He argued that “human beings exist in organized plu-
ralities” (Wolf 1982, 72), not as billiard balls bouncing off
one another across the space of history. It is this plural-
istic, rather than normative, aspect of human organization
that leads to an understanding of political economic influ-
ence over ecological interactions: “One couldn’t talk about
the ecology without considering the political-economic pro-
cesses involved in actual historical situations” (Wolf 1987;
cited in Friedman 1987, 110).
Through these shifts in focus, the social sciences be-
came not simply historical but, significantly, centered on
situating the local within the global (e.g., Comaroff and
Comaroff 1991; Falk Moore 1987; Mintz 1985; Nash 1993;
Roseberry 1989; Sahlins 1985; Wolf 1982). Simultane-
ously, ecological anthropologists criticized neo-functionalist
models of closed, equilibrium systems and their emphasis
on studying energy flows and capture. Vayda and McCay
(1975, 295) asserted that this “caloric obsession” (Vayda and
McCay 1975, 295) inhibits scientists from understanding
human responses to many contemporary problems and haz-
ards. Vayda and McCay’s (1975) critique would influence not
only political ecology (see, by way of comparison, Vayda
and Walters 1999) but also contemporary socioecological
research on dynamic systems and resilience (see below).
Archaeologists writing during this time also sought to in-
corporate political economic change in their long-term re-
constructions. Debates occurred in the 1970s and 1980s be-
tween cultural ecological and political economic models of
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
long-term historical change and social evolution (e.g.,
Adams 1966; Blanton 1976; Brumfiel 1980; Gilman 1981;
Johnson and Earle 1989; Redman 1978; Sanders and Nichols
1988; Sanders and Price 1968). This trajectory witnessed
the recognition of culture as a concept that for too long en-
couraged monolithic thinking (see Comaroff 2010). Hence,
political ecology is not simply cultural ecology plus political
economy. It has come to represent and to manifest something
different.
The Dimensions of Political Ecology
Following this interwoven genealogy, we now consider
the application of political ecology across diverse contem-
porary research. Robbins (2012, 5) asserts that political
ecology constitutes a community of practice composed of
researchers learning from one another by examining histor-
ically contingent relations of power across landscapes and
livelihoods. Above all, he suggests that political ecology rep-
resents an alternative to apolitical ecology. Apolitical ecolo-
gies are those that either ignore the human element or ignore
the distribution of power and its consequences when human
relationships are considered. Hence, much of political ecol-
ogy is framed as critique. Deconstructions of politics’ dis-
cursive components are fundamental to its genealogy (i.e.,
Escobar 1996, 1999; Ingerson 1994). However, the goals
of this critique also are productive and potentially progres-
sive in outlook and application. Many important works in
political ecology that employ a critical perspective also are
centered on the collection of empirical data about the physi-
cal environment, human activities, and important processes,
relations, and systems (see, by way of comparison, Vayda
and Walters 1999).
We identify four major bodies of research that recur
in political ecology and are relevant to its integration with
archaeology. First are modern engagements with the con-
cept of development that deal with issues of globalization,
inequality, and sustainability. Second, literature that focuses
on landscapes and livelihoods provides insight into the ac-
tive roles that environments play in the daily lives of people
and their relationships with places. Third, feminist political
ecologists who have moved beyond the study of class dy-
namics or global and local disparities help us to recognize
multiple intersecting dimensions of power and inequality.
All of these critical perspectives have implications for how
we conceptualize power itself. Thus, we discuss a fourth
trend that is emerging from different sources and that offers
an opportunity to re-assess the relationality of power and to
modify our understanding of who political agents are and
what political relationships can be.
9
Beyond development
Viewing local people in world-historical terms requires
recognition of the increasingly global processes that in-
fluence their relationships to each other and to the en-
vironment, including those that result in exploitation and
disenfranchisement. Substantial social evolutionary theory
can be criticized for intellectually validating contemporary
conditions as inevitable consequences of complexity (see
Friedman 1987; Patterson 1987; Stocking 1968). Develop-
mental policies sought to operationalize this ethos and im-
prove local life via the modernization of technology and
infrastructures and the integration of local economies into
global markets. Strong shadows of Smith and Malthus per-
vade this thinking, which laid the blame for poverty on the
seemingly irrational behavior of subject communities. The
causes of poverty, hence, were to be found in either over-
population or in the institutional tyranny of local systems of
production, rather than Colonialism, post-National conflict,
or the expansion of Western capital and corporate invest-
ment (e.g., Escobar 1996; Ferguson 1990; Lappé and Collins
1977; Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2010; Robbins 2012; Yapa
1996).
This sentiment can be seen clearly in Garrett Hardin’s
(1968) famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which
continues to shape economic and legal thinking on environ-
mental policy. Left unchecked, Hardin observed, the maxi-
mizing behavior of individuals leads to the over-exploitation
of common resources to the point of degradation. His rem-
edy was either governmental intervention or privatization.
Hardin has been criticized rightly for misconstruing com-
mons as open-access resources (e.g., Ostrom 1990); com-
mons are usually resources well-managed by collective
institutions, and both privatization and governmental in-
tervention can disrupt their sustainability. Hardin’s essay
remains influential due to continued conservative thinking
against the welfare state in terms little different than earlier
writers like Malthus (Hughes 2000, 40–42). Many studies
continue to model the bottom-up, institutional nexus govern-
ing commons in ways that necessarily place both sustainabil-
ity and unsustainability on the shoulders of local resource
users, rather than on the broader world.
The Neo-Malthusian perspective explicit in Hardin’s
analysis represents an incomplete view on population growth
and its potential impact on food sources, environments, and
economic development (Robbins 2012, 14; see, by way of
comparison, Vayda and McCay 1975). As discussed above, it
represents a deliberate strategy to blame people for their own
conditions. Large family sizes among the impoverished and
disenfranchised became evidence of irrational thinking and
behavior, key characteristics of the “savage slot” (Trouillot
10
2003, 23): poor household management, the unbridled las-
civiousness of less advanced people, laziness, etc. This idea
ignores considerable evidence to the contrary that demon-
strates that households make strategic decisions depending
on multiple environmental and institutional considerations
(e.g., Boserup 1965; Chayanov 1966; Netting 1993; Wilk
1997; Wolf 1966). The Neoliberal ideology that everyone
can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if economic po-
tential is not tethered to governmental intervention ignores
the race to the bottom in wages and livelihood. Patterson
(1994, 225) argues that the Neo-Malthusian perspective on
socially, economically, and politically undifferentiated pop-
ulations “prevents them from asking questions about social
relations, class structures, or the impact that various cultur-
ally informed practices have on the environment.” Bodley
(2008, 99) observed that when regions appear to experi-
ence “Malthusian crises” it is typically the result of cultural
and institutional processes, such as social inequality. Yapa
(1996) summarizes this condition: “poverty is not the re-
sult of lack of development, poor technology, or scarce re-
sources, but a normal manifestation of the very process of
economic development that is supposed to cure it; develop-
ment causes modern poverty through ‘socially constructed
scarcity’” (1996, 69).
Landscapes and livelihoods
Significantly, these critiques centered not only on the
negative impact of development on peoples’ lives but also on
ecosystems and landscapes. Blaikie and Brookfield’s book
Land Degradation and Society is considered a canonical
text in political ecology. Foreshadowing later work on the
archaeology of landscapes (i.e., Tilley 1994), they argue
that to the extent that the environment has played a role in
understandings of tenure and inequality, “it is only as a pas-
sive backdrop to human interaction” (Blaikie and Brookfield
1987, 1). Defining land degradation as a social and political
economic problem requires recognition of the feedback be-
tween institutional and environmental systems and also the
impact of land managers as mediators of this milieu—agents
who exist at the “intersection of circumstance and strategy”
(Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 7). Blaikie and Brookfield do
not conceive of land managers necessarily as the culprits of
mismanagement and degradation (as Hardin does). Rather,
they stress that researchers specify a hierarchy of land man-
agers who exist in potentially dissimilar social, political, and
economic decision-making environments.
Along with the study of degradation, political ecolo-
gists also have elucidated how human actions to enhance
landscapes create material legacies that persist, with both
Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
positive and negative outcomes. The notion of landesque
capital, introduced by Sen (1959), has been informative
in this regard. Sen distinguished between laboresque and
landesque capital in the context of agrarian development.
Critically, Sen’s work was an effort to modify the trinity
of “factors of production” (land, labor, and capital) within
the context of developing agrarian economies, where capital
does not exist as a distinctive factor of production but is tai-
lored to modifications of human labor (i.e., plows, tractors,
hoes, etc.: laboresque capital) and land (irrigation works,
terraces, soil amendments, etc.: landesque capital). Today,
the materiality of landscape changes can be seen in differ-
ent forms of intensive landesque and laboresque capital that
facilitate intensification as well as technologies related to
the storage of grain, to the production of fertilizers and pes-
ticides, to the innovation of germplasm, and to secondary
markets derived from surplus and subsidies (e.g., ethanol).
At both macro and micro levels, these changes are part
of relatively recent global transformations that are creating
stratigraphic signatures characteristic of a potentially new
geologic epoch, the Anthropocene (e.g., Price et al. 2011;
Waters et al. 2014).
However, scholars employ the concept of landesque
capital to shed light not only on economic development
but also on the materiality of landscapes. The concept has
become important for political ecologists and for archaeol-
ogists because of the fixed and enduring qualities of lan-
desque capital (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Brookfield
1971, 1984; Fisher 2005; Morehart 2016; Widgren and
Håkansson 2014). Enduring improvements to the land—
whether they be terraces, canals, or augmented soils and
fields—draw attention to the multiple time-scales at which
human–environmental interactions occur. Landesque capi-
tal investments, in other words, shape the present but also
are inherited into the future, in both intended and unintended
ways.
Temporal and spatial scales are central elements in po-
litical ecological research, and political ecologists increas-
ingly develop multi-scale approaches to situate proximate
causes within more systemic, structural ones (Gezon and
Paulson 2005; Paulson, Gezon, and Watts 2005; Robbins
2012, 20). Local resource users and land managers, land-
lords, local and national governmental officials, and repre-
sentatives of NGOs or transnational corporations comprise
the pool of possible human agents that shape environmen-
tal conditions. The sizes and densities of their social net-
works vary considerably. This is an important observation.
Land degradation, such as erosion, is a highly localized phe-
nomenon that is nevertheless connected to non-local pro-
cesses (Blaikie 1985). The consequences of agents’ actions
greatly depend on whether they are bound to or able to
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
transcend local circumstances. Some agents’ actions have
potentially more tangible effects than others, producing an
unequal distribution of outcomes, both positive and nega-
tive (Gezon and Paulson 2005, 7). As Blaikie and Brookfield
(1987, 14) observed, “one person’s degradation is another’s
accumulation.”
Feminist political ecologies
Feminist political ecologists raised new questions about
the identities and positions of the people and the environ-
ments that unequal development differentially affects. A
trajectory in feminist scholarship that specifically contem-
plated the connections between nature and gender informed
this critique. Nature played a key role in the genealogy of
feminist scholarship and activism. Second wave feminism,
for example, provided a specific narrative of women’s re-
lationship to the natural world that was historically essen-
tializing but also politically empowering (see di Leonardo
1991). On the one hand, the view that women are univer-
sally more bio-culturally connected to nature than men due
to their reproductive statuses offered a means (albeit a prob-
lematic one) to conceptualize female subordination (e.g.,
Ortner 1974). But on the other, it also provided a vehi-
cle discursively and organizationally to combat patriarchy
and its demonstrably negative impact on the environment
(Merchant 1992). Marxist theory, particularly through
Engels (1972 [1884]), presented another opportunity to chal-
lenge the status quo because systemic inequalities in the
social fabric required patriarchy’s conquest of an ancestral
matriarchal condition.
Most of the ancestral social formations in Marx and
Engels’ evolutionary model, such as the existence of prim-
itive communist matriarchies, are (perhaps ironically) idyl-
lic. But this work is significant because it contributed to
investigations into the variable historical forces that pro-
duced particular gender relations, notably how specific po-
litical economic arrangements affected labor and property
(di Leonardo 1991; Rubin 1975; Sacks 1975). Simultane-
ously, environmental social scientists began to pay more at-
tention to women. New research focused on women’s roles
in the reproduction of household economies and agricul-
tural practices (e.g., Bain 1993; Boserup 1989; Guyer 1991;
Poats, Schmink, and Spring 1988; Rocheleau 1988). Sci-
entists also documented women as significant agents in the
maintenance of ecological knowledge and biodiversity.
Focusing on women helped anthropologists open up the
black box of the household. The potentially negative impact
(directly and indirectly) that Western political economies
had on local environments often began by disrupting the
11
ways households managed and allocated labor. Capitalism’s
reorganization of the household, in other words, created
multiple paths of dependency toward increasingly exploita-
tive and even unsustainable human–environmental rela-
tions. Significantly, ecological degradation and the efforts to
prevent it are both gendered phenomena (e.g., Bain 1993),
revealing the intersections among culture, ecology, and po-
litical economy. Recognition of these intersections helped
move scholars away from cultural essentialism to the his-
toricism of political ecology (and third-wave feminism).
Feminist research pushes us beyond gender to the in-
tersectionality that characterizes relations (Collins 2015).
Specifically in political ecology, feminist scholars note re-
searchers often treat class as the most important source
of inequality, at the expense of other power dynamics
(Buechler and Hanson 2015; Elmhirst 2011; Harris 2009;
Rocheleau 1995; Rocheleau and Roth 2007). This insight
fuels substantial research on the configurations among
class, race, ethnicity, pollution, and health within and be-
tween developed and developing nations (and their borders)
(e.g., Bullard 2000; Chavis 1994; Checker 2008; Heyman
2005; Johnson and Niemeyer 2008; Johnston and Jorgensen
1994; McLauchlan 2006; Narchi and Canabal Cristiani
2015; Schroeder, St Martin, and Albert 2006; Walker 2003;
Walker and Fortmann 2003). These critical framings con-
tribute to questions about who is affected by environmental
changes and who can effect change, producing important
new conversations about politics, ecologies, and the rela-
tional dimensions of power.
Relational approaches to politics and ecologies
A renewed interest in the relational constellations of
elements that constitute societies and ecologies is emerg-
ing. Understanding phenomena relationally attempts to as-
certain their mutual influence and how more encompassing
formations emerge from this milieu. Multiple perspectives
surround this idea, not all of which employ this terminology,
but they have strong implications for the study of the politics
that structure environmental interactions. Political economic
approaches are relational to the extent that value and power
are never inherent properties of things but are defined in rela-
tion to the institutional contexts that structure economic and
technological interactions (see Harvey 1974). Ecosystems
research—even early ecological approaches (Odum 1964)—
are relational because they focus on the relationships among
constituent parts of a given system. A relational analytic is
also a framework that cross-cuts several nominally different
but intellectually overlapping conversations surrounding en-
tanglement, assemblage theory, bundling, symmetry, actor
12
network theory, time-geography, semiotics, and, again, con-
ventional political economy (e.g., Bennett 2010; DeLanda
2006; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Gell 1998; Harvey 1974;
Hodder 2012; Hutson 2013; Ingold 2011; Latour 2005;
Olsen et al. 2012; Pred 1977; Urry 1985). For the study
of political ecology, more specifically, these relational ap-
proaches lead to productive re-conceptualizations of power
and particularly the human and nonhuman relationships that
shape and are shaped by its distribution.
Definitions of types of power elucidate historical trans-
formations, but they also can blur important differences be-
tween power and politics. In the process, power is viewed
only in the negative—equated with inequality, disenfran-
chisement, resistance, etc. (Miller 1989, 64). Many treat-
ments of power, such as Wolf’s (1990, 1999) and Mann’s
(1986), center on the institutional milieu through which
power can be channelized. Mann’s (1986) analysis of types
of power (social power, economic power, military power, and
ideological power) emphasizes the organizational strategies
through which states or empires struggle with legitimacy as
they expand and maintain order, stability, and control. Ar-
chaeologists have found this analytic useful for specific and
comparative studies of complex society (e.g., Alcock et al.
2001; Earle 1997; Sinopoli and Morrison 1994). Wolf’s dis-
cussion of modes of power, structural and organizational,
likewise emphasizes power as institutionally channeled. His
analysis stresses power passing through particular organi-
zational (i.e., institutional) relations that shape the nature
(and capacity) of interaction and also structure the dis-
tribution of resources and opportunities at broader, even
global, scales. This view is foreshadowed by Lukes’ ([1974]
2005, 26) three dimensional view of power, in which (a
priori) social structures and recurrent cultural patterns in-
fluence the possibilities for individual forms of behavior and
modes of thought (see also Gaventa 1980, 15). Marx’s view
of social power also captured the materially and the im-
materially institutional mechanisms through which power
is appropriated and mobilized (e.g., Marx 1973). Social
power is not power per se, but rather a filter that structures
and is born from how people and things interact and how
wealth is accumulated via the relations and the means of
production.
A relational view of power is not new. It has antecedents
in the earliest writings about power, as discussed above in our
interpretation of Hobbes. Power is “as the Hobbesian def-
inition suggests, oriented towards things, and anything can
become the basis of power” (Freidrich 1950, cited in Adams
1975, 19). As Adams (1975, 17) summarizes, “power is
thus clearly a relational issue.” Foucault (e.g., 1972) con-
veyed this sense of power by viewing its “capillary” na-
ture, immanent in our actions but occupying a substrate
Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
just below their manifestations. Although Foucault (1972,
97) disagreed with Hobbes on the relations among power,
the sovereign, and subjects, his core notion of power dif-
fered little: it is a force, albeit one connected to institutions,
bodies, practices, technologies, discourses, knowledge, etc.
His focus on overt, hyper-material institutions—the prison,
the hospital, the mental ward—represented historical and
metaphorical attempts not just to study these phenomena
but to show the dialectical relation between institutions and
social transformation. Historically, they are studies of how
specific institutions foster particular relations of domination,
which then come to influence wider society. Metaphorically,
the study of these institutions was an ironic analysis of the
seemingly acephalous nature of the modern world, where in-
dividuals mutually discipline one another—subjects to each
other as much as to institutions of the state.
Although perhaps not obvious for many contempo-
rary treatments of power, examining power relationally is
well suited to understandings of ecology. The earliest treat-
ments of systemic ecology, for example, focused on the
interaction between biotic and abiotic elements (includ-
ing human and nonhuman) via the differential distribution
of energy at distinctive spatial scales, temporal rates, and
trophic levels (e.g., Odum 1964; Rappaport 1971). Ecol-
ogy stresses the relational mechanisms and thermodynamic
processes through which energy is captured, processed, and
distributed. Humans’ ability to deploy the energy that they
capture from ecosystems to modify nature is at the very
root of historical reconstructions of power and humanized
nature (see above). Hornborg (2001), for example, elabo-
rated an analysis of thermodynamic processes historically
to understand a global political economic ecosystem in-
creasingly invested in a technology that both intensifies the
transformation of energy and, similar to Marx, obscures the
social relationships necessary for its existence. Linked to-
gether, politics and ecology shape how power flows, is mo-
bilized, accumulated, and deployed depending on the rela-
tionships among things, places, landscapes, institutions, and
people.
We do not discuss the relational nature of power to em-
phasize its general omnipresence; a position that could be
used to justify political apathy (Fraser 1989; Hartsock 1990;
Lukes 2005 [1974], 12). Instead, we emphasize the rela-
tional nature of power as variable, contingent, and mutable.
The idea of political ecology as a means to understand net-
works of relations is not new, at least conceptually. Bertrand
de Jouvenel’s (1957) first use of the term “political ecol-
ogy” clearly recognized this fact: “human life is completely
dependent upon a great company of other forms of exis-
tence. This is why I speak of Political Ecology” (de Jouvenel
1957, 291). Thus, we also recognize a post-humanist
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
critique relevant to the concerns of political ecology that
questions human’s supposed elevation above nature and so-
called modern humans’ superiority to a premodern past
(Latour 1993; Robbins 2012). Post-humanists argue for an
ontological symmetry among people, places, and things bun-
dled or entangled together at different temporal and spatial
scales (Hodder 2012; Olsen et al. 2012; Robb and Pauketat
2013). As Hodder (2012, 26, 89) notes, “Dominance, power
and social difference all depend on things and access to
things. . . . [T]he social world of humans and the material
world of things are entangled together by dependencies and
dependencies that create potentials, further investments and
entrapments.”
For Latour (e.g., 2004, 2005), distinctions between hu-
mans and nature are part of a modernist ethos built upon con-
ceptual dichotomies that obscure the co-existence of people
and things in networks of relations. Severing the fundamen-
tal connections between “humans” and “nature” was a neces-
sary condition of modern consciousness. Yet this represents
an ideology that obscures the mutual dependence of multiple
(human and nonhuman) agents and legitimizes unequal and
exploitative relations between them. His suggestion is not to
go back to a romantic vision of a “premodern” world where
humans and nature existed in tranquil harmony and spiritual
reciprocity. Instead, his suggestion echoes Douglas’ (1966)
astute observations on the fundamentally ritualized and cos-
mological nature of all culturally informed behavior. We live
in worlds with more densely occupied networks and more
tangible and intangible things. But we nonetheless interact
with, depend upon, and actually treat these “things” as co-
actors and agents, not unlike the worldviews anthropologists
long have ascribed to “premodern” cultures. In other words,
we have never been modern (Latour 1993).
Bringing nonhumans into understandings of politics
and ecology complicates the typical critique of humans ver-
sus nature, including those treatments of socialized nature
that come from both Marxist and post-structural perspec-
tives (e.g., Descola and Pálsson 1996; Escobar 1996, 1999;
Hughes 2000; Ingerson 1994). Post-humanists and related
thinkers argue that even these accounts privilege the hu-
man milieu—one reason writers like Latour (2004, 2005)
speak of collectives (e.g., assemblages) comprised of net-
works with both human and nonhuman “actants.” Attribut-
ing power to nonhumans can reshape understandings of the
world by clarifying the ways in which we depend on each
other (which sounds remarkably like an ecosystem). It also
can provide alternative models of reality that have potential
for global impact. This is fundamentally an engaged and
activist perspective. If the influencing power of nonhumans
is recognized as legitimate, the door can be opened for new
forms of governance that not only respect nonhumans but
13
give greater voice and power to systematically disenfran-
chised, under-represented, excluded, and often objectified
groups (Bennett 2010, 104–108). For some, this is not sim-
ply a philosophical debate but recognition of an intensifying
historical transformation to change “the liberal humanist
subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature”
(Hayles 1999, 288). It is no surprise, therefore, that major so-
cial movements in both the global North and South occurred
during this period of time in recent history (e.g., Peet and
Watts 1996; Warren 1998). The recognition that nonhuman
entities, such as the Ganges or the Whanganui rivers, can and
may increasingly be given legal rights as persons is evidence
of this ongoing movement, which is far from restricted to
debates within academia. For many archaeologists, the post-
humanist view may diverge from conventional analyses of
the relations between institutions and the environment or
may seem overly fashionable and unproductive. But if the
methodological and interpretive implications of this view
appear challenging to either employ or accept, the moral-
ethical dimension of the post-humanist critique should
not be.
Archaeology and Political Ecology
It is surprising that basic introductory texts on polit-
ical ecology make very little mention of archaeology. For
instance, both editions of Robbins’ (2004, 2012) important
introduction to political ecology spend more time describing
Foucault’s metaphorical use of the term “archaeology” than
examining archaeologists’ contributions. Archaeologists are
trained to reconstruct long-term history and to analyze mul-
tiple material phenomena that operate at different scales and
degrees of permanence. As Ingold notes, “it is of course part
of an archaeological training to learn to attend to those clues
which the rest of us might pass over (literally, when they
are below the surface), and which make it possible to tell a
fuller or a richer story” (1993, 153). Below we discuss some
major areas where archaeologists have contributed directly
to political ecology, even if not explicitly recognized, and
areas where inserting political ecology can better address
long-held interests in archaeology. We also consider the role
archaeology plays in research on socio-ecological systems,
historical ecology, and the study of global change. From
these discussions, foci of research that archaeologists are
particularly good at studying emerge, particularly the po-
litical ecology of landscapes and their legacies. Finally, we
suggest that political ecological archaeology can enhance
our understandings of how humans are materially rework-
ing the environment at scales and magnitudes never before
observed.
14
Archaeology, historical ecology, and political ecology
The relationship between politics and the environment
has been a major issue in the archaeology of long-term
change. One trend in neo-evolutionary theory stressed cul-
tural ecology and proposed that as populations grew in size
and density, managerial classes emerged that facilitated the
trade of surpluses or the administration of complex agrarian
systems (Cohen 1981; Sanders and Nichols 1988; Sanders
and Price 1968; Steward 1955; Wittfogel 1957). Inequality,
in other words, was an adaptive response to the distribu-
tion of resources and people. Another trend developed in re-
sponse to cultural ecology and, instead, stressed the evolution
of political economies. This trend examined how inequal-
ity developed to finance the interests of parasitic classes of
elites (e.g., Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Earle 1997; Gilman
1981; Johnson and Earle 1989; Trigger 1998) and often
maintained a systems framework inherited from cybernetic
(and ecosystems) theory (i.e., Blanton 1976; Flannery 1972;
Johnson 1978). These models placed considerable emphasis
on hierarchy and leaders in managing complexity, including
economic and information systems.
Substantial changes in perspective on the archaeol-
ogy of inequality have occurred. The tensions, contradic-
tions, and relationships among different social actors—
major operational loci of power relations themselves—were
not well specified in many evolutionary models. Many social
evolutionary approaches viewed inequality as an epiphe-
nomenal byproduct of hierarchy’s function in solving sys-
temic sociocultural problems (Paynter 1989, 374). Models
stressing hierarchy often did not consider how increasing
relative inequality co-varies with greater social heterogene-
ity (McGuire 1983). Brumfiel (1992) specifically encour-
aged archaeologists to consider internal variation among
social actors, particularly as their social relations, practices,
and agency are conditioned by classes, factions, and gen-
ders, and social change as a series of “composite outcomes
of social conflict and compromise among people with dif-
ferent problems and possibilities” (Brumfield 1992, 553).
Crumley (1995) pushed archaeologists to consider constel-
lations of power that are not distributed hierarchically but
are instead heterarchical, when entities are unranked rela-
tive to one another. Heterarchy has been employed to ana-
lyze the distribution of power at different scales, a view that
reinforces relational perspectives on power we discussed
above. Indeed, archaeologists have studied how constella-
tions of power were reproduced via the practices of agents
across political landscapes (Smith 2003). The role of physi-
cal places, objects, and events are central aspects to research
on the relational constitution of political orders, the materi-
alization of political institutions, and social transformation
Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
(Bauer and Kosiba 2016; Beck et al. 2007; Demarrais
DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996; Earle 2004; Smith
2015). Archaeologists also have begun to consider the col-
lective arrangements struck between rulers and ruled as well
as how organizational variability in political participation re-
lates to inequality (Blanton et al. 1996; Blanton and Fargher
2008; Carballo et al. 2013; Lohse 2013; Smith et al. 2014).
These are not substitutes for hierarchical models but, rather,
stress alternative forms of governance and political decision-
making within otherwise hierarchically organized polities.
In some societies, however, the individuals or groups that
are able to mobilize people and resources for political ends
sometimes are embedded or subsumed within more commu-
nal or non-class relationships (Brown and Kelly 2014; Saitta
1994, 1997).
Models stressing hierarchical political relations in com-
plex societies emphasize intensive agriculture and (lan-
desque) capital investments in order to produce crops and
livestock necessary to underwrite the political economy
(e.g., Algaze 2001; Hirth 1996). States need produce to fi-
nance institutions, to convert food into exchangeable goods
and services, and to feed the bodies of subjects, both rulers
and ruled. Agricultural intensification supports large pop-
ulations and yields surpluses, a process that shapes entire
landscapes by altering biotic and abiotic dynamics (Redman
1999). The negative effects of these processes receive con-
siderable attention, and ecological degradation is a culprit
in both scientific and popular writings on the collapse of
state societies (e.g., Diamond 2005; Tainter 1988, 2006).
However, these shifts are not always detrimental, and many
civilizations that collapsed nonetheless exhibited consid-
erable longevity (e.g., Lentz, Dunning, and Scarborough
2015). People find innovative ways to increase production
sustainably by, for example, building terrace systems that
mitigate erosion, canals that irrigate or drain land, or raised
fields that convert inundated into arable land (Guttman-Bond
2010; Hayashida 2005; Whitmore and Turner 2001). Such
landesque capital investments can represent systemic im-
provements that persist for multiple generations. Their aban-
donment and ensuing degradation are often tied as much to
changes or shifts in the political economy as to outstripping
local resource bases (Fisher 2005; Morehart and Frederick
2014). Yet changes nevertheless still have systemic connec-
tions to environmental relationships. Abandoning a Neo-
Malthusian argument does not necessarily entail ignoring
human–environmental connections.
Understanding these long-term interactions between
humans and the environment is a basic aspect of historical
ecology. Crumley defined historical ecology as an approach
that “traces the ongoing dialectical relations between human
acts and acts of nature, made manifest in the landscape”
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations 15

(1994, 9). As she initially characterized the field, historical hierarchy can constrain or influence processes at another.
ecology was intrinsically eclectic, with scholars pulling on (Redman 2008, 5)
insight, methods, and concepts from multiple fields, includ-
Efforts to study long-term legacies focus attention on
ing anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary theory, ecology,
consequences as well as on the inheritance of landscapes,
environmental history, etc. This framework recognized: sys-
a view with important implications for archaeological work
temic social and ecological relationships operating at dif-
(Bauer, Johansen, and Bauer 2007; Redman 2008; Redman
ferent scales; the thresholds that shape the resilience of a
and Kinzig 2003; Scarborough 2007). That is, to historicize
particular system of relations; and the consequences and
research these scientists recognize organizational and also
transformations that follow from decision-making and ac-
material legacies and their impact on subsequent systems.
tions. Furthermore, it recognized humans’ relationships
Such a longue durée approach to historical ecology (Balée
to their environments as ongoing and emergent dialogues
2006; Håkansson and Widgren 2014; Moore and Thompson
(Balée 1998, 14).
2012; Redman and Kinzig 2003; Thompson 2014) stresses
Given this framework, historical ecology developed
that any specific social and material formation in time and
progressively strong ties to a body of research found in
space is not simply the product of previous configurations
complex adaptive systems, socio-ecological systems, and
but, further, is the heir to a legacy of social and physical
resilience theory. A “new ecology” emerged that stressed
processes. This work also can offer integrated analyses of
the dynamic nature of ecosystems and the nonlinearity of
both human and nonhuman elements, entities, and processes
systems (Botkin 1990; Holling 1973, 1986, 2001; Lansing
that operate not only at different scales but differently within
2003; Zimmerer 1994). Archaeologists have played a lead-
and between them.
ing role in this work, using their research to address long-
Simultaneously, political ecology demonstrates that
term, increasingly global transformations; to compare past
ecological risks, hazards, catastrophes, and changes do
case studies with the present; or both. Practitioners main-
not affect everyone equally (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987;
tain a focus on topics of current concern, such as cli-
Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). In fact, political ecolo-
mate change, sustainable development, and the degrada-
gists and geographers offer a growing critique of research
tion of resources (Chase and Scarborough 2014; Costanza
that seeks to model resilience and sustainability (Adger
et al. 2007; Falconer and Redman 2009; Fisher et al. 2009;
2000; MacKinnon and Derickson 2012; O’Malley 2010;
Redman 2005; Redman et al. 2004; van der Leeuw and
Walker and Cooper 2011). Critics argue that understated ge-
Redman 2002). These new ecological approaches may carry
nealogical relationships between sustainability research and
new labels, including “socionatural” systems (Dean 2000;
international development projects exist. Efforts to specify
McGlade 1995; van der Leeuw and Redman 2002), “coupled
a more resilient system are viewed as a Neoliberal culmina-
human and natural systems” (Liu et al. 2007; Kintigh et al.
tion of post-World War II international developmental pol-
2014), “socioecology” (Barton et al. 2004), “human ecody-
icy, reinforcing belief in the inevitability of a present status
namics” (McGlade 1995; Kirch 2005, 2007), and “complex
quo. Similarly, archaeological political ecology can show
adaptive systems” (Lansing 2003), but they derive from a
that political constraints and consequences are unevenly
similar set of interests.
distributed within any given social and physical landscape
Much of this work can reinforce concerns in politi-
(e.g., Joyce 2009; Thurston 1999, 2007, 2009). Efforts to
cal ecology, particularly via control over scales of time and
maintain stability in the face of ecological limits or changes
space in relation to empirical social and physical data. A
can come at high social costs (Hegmon et al. 2008). This
sizeable number of multiscale studies in political ecology are
work also reminds us that archaeological landscapes that are
qualitative or discursive analyses in which the links across
visible today are more than legacies of decisions inscribed
space and time, as well as the causal connections between
onto the landscape. They are also testaments to inequalities,
them, are underspecified. The recognition that multiscale
conflicts, and contradictions (e.g., Crumley 1994; Mathevet
approaches are needed represents a useful area where polit-
et al. 2015; Sluyter 2003).
ical ecology and land-use change sciences can reinforce one
another (Turner and Robbins 2008). For example, socio-
ecological researchers studying long-term ecological and Plan of the Volume
cultural change advocate an approach that is
An archaeological approach to political ecology high-
multiscalar—spanning temporal, spatial, and organiza-
tional scales—and emphasizes identification of potential lights long-term change, multiple social and spatial scales,
critical “scales” or critical “cross-scale” interactions, elu- the relationships that shape the distribution of power, and
cidating the ways in which processes at one level of the cultural and historical contingency. This volume focuses
16
Figure 1.1. Locations of the sites and regions discussed in this volume.
primarily on engagements with the physical world: land-
scapes, landmarks, resources, practices, and meanings. The
papers in Uneven Terrain target different world areas, cul-
tural groups, periods of time, and historical processes. We
do more than argue solely for historical particularism, cul-
tural contingency, or criticisms of prevailing narratives of
cultural and ecological change. Our contributors expand the
range of cultural, historical, and political contexts in which
political ecological generalizations can be made.
In a similar fashion, the ideas of political ecology di-
rect the archaeological study of human–environmental in-
teraction to account for relations of power. The archaeo-
logical study of landscapes has recently benefited from a
cultural turn (Ashmore 2004; Ashmore and Knapp 1999;
Bender et al. 2007; Bowser and Zedeño 2009; Hendon
2010; Johnson 1996). One consequence of this turn has
been a tendency to de-emphasize political motives, actions,
and consequences as drivers of environmental change and
landscape formation (but see Koontz, Reese-Taylor, and
Headrick 2001; Smith 2003). We argue that understanding
politics is fundamental to any study of ancient landscapes,
natural resources, or environmental change.
With these ideas in mind, our contributors emphasize
three themes that are strengths and contributions of an
Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
archaeological approach to the study of political ecology:
(1) the material nature of the landscape; (2) multi-scalar ap-
proaches in time and space; and (3) cultural and historical
contingency. These themes do not exhaust the possible in-
tersections of archaeology and political ecology, and each
contribution expands beyond them. But these issues reflect
the intrinsic merit of archaeological contributions.
An archaeology of political ecology is necessarily go-
ing to focus on those parts of the material record that
trace the institutionalized ecology of power, especially land-
scapes as they are composed of relationships among hu-
man sites, paths, and traces of other activities. In this vol-
ume, several authors treat politics and the construction of
landscapes as embedded processes that interlock with re-
ligion, economy, and social traditions. Their spatial cov-
erage includes North America, Mesoamerica, the North
Atlantic, Europe, the Near East, and South Asia (Figure 1.1).
In total, this volume covers (1) thousands of years of hu-
man occupation of and developing relationships with land-
scapes (Figure 1.2); (2) moments of cultural contact and
the transmission of new plants and animals, new economic
priorities, new extractive and productive technologies, and
new cultural understandings of the world; and (3) places
where the landscape emerges as a basis for negotiating new
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
Figure 1.2. Time periods covered in the papers in this volume.
relationships, including social and political, between people
and things.
This volume is organized into two sections, split by an
emphasis on spatial and temporal scales. In the first half of
this volume (Chapters 2–5), authors focus on issues relating
to political ecology within the time frame of the ancient past,
and consider multiple processes within defined periods. The
second half of this volume (Chapter 6–9) considers similar
processes, but expands the authors’ time frames to include
the present day.
Rosenzweig (Chapter 2) presents the concept of agri-
cultural colonization within the Neo-Assyrian empire ca.
934–611 BCE in Upper Mesopotamia. Within this context,
agricultural development was used as a tool of state-craft and
was not limited to subsistence needs. Rosenzweig demon-
strates how material-practical and discursive-ideological
dimensions of agricultural experience produced political
subjects. While this case study asks us to reconsider the in-
stitutions and power behind the seemingly utilitarian spaces
of farmers, Johnson (Chapter 3) analyzes the everyday ac-
tivities and spaces of medieval castles (11th–14th centuries
CE.), quintessential symbols of authority. Starting with the
English Castle of Bodiam, Johnson’s analysis reveals how
castles channeled multiple intersecting flows of energy,
goods, wealth, people, and animals. His contribution decon-
structs the mythical imagery and fetishization that surround
castles by demonstrating how they were nodes that shaped
broader political, economic, and cultural processes.
Thompson and colleagues (Chapter 4) provide a de-
tailed analysis of “events,” or short-term ruptures that in-
cited significant structural change in the Calusa chiefdoms
between 1513 and 1569 CE, during the period of Span-
ish contact. Their account of the events that transpired in the
wetlands, a landscape understood quite differently by Iberian
and indigenous peoples, reveals a complex set of politi-
cal decisions that forever transformed the social structures
17
of Calusa society. The chapter also offers a perspective on
the role of individual actors, a factor that is often missing
from archaeological investigations.
Juarez (Chapter 5) studies the rise of urbanism at the
site of Noh K’uh in Chiapas, Mexico during the Middle
and Late Preclassic (1000 BCE and 400 CE) on the edge
of the Southern Maya Lowlands. Through his analysis of
landscape modifications, Juarez demonstrates how the con-
struction of sacred cityscapes was used to both revere the
cosmological universe and to establish a communal iden-
tity. In this case, the political landscape reflects the prac-
tices and institutions that were designed to promote cooper-
ation, rather than competition, during a period of increasing
complexity.
The papers in the remainder of this volume bridge an-
cient and modern studies of space in order to describe a de-
tailed and ever-changing landscape. Much like a palimpsest,
the alterations and addition to landscapes accumulate over
time to tell the complex story of human existence. Thurston
(Chapter 6) considers the social and political power of
agropastoral people and their experiences during encap-
sulation by expansionist states in present-day Lesotho and
medieval Sweden. Attachments to places, in addition to pro-
cesses of marginalization, are recognized today in terms that
are material as well as psychosocial, but the latter is rarely
available to archaeologists. Through a comparison between
two cases, Thurston builds a framework for predicting and
identifying the kinds of stress that may have been the result
of environmental change.
Working in Iceland, Catlin and Bolender’s (Chapter
7) long-term approach to the study of landscape reveals
how small-scale manipulations transformed a fairly egali-
tarian society into one defined by massive inequality. Be-
ginning with medieval Iceland (870 CE), they demonstrate
how the decisions that surrounded the initial settlement and
agricultural development of these lands led to a gradual
18
degradation of environment, which in turn led to signifi-
cantly imbalanced resource distribution in the modern day.
Many of these processes were subtle and localized, but over
time led to permanent transformations in landscape that
drastically altered systems for both humans and the natural
environment.
Millhauser and Morehart (Chapter 8) use the long-term
history of Lake Xaltocan in the northern Basin of Mexico
to reconsider sustainability as a relative process. The
2500-year history of human occupation around the lake re-
veals how the politically-situated actions of its inhabitants
transformed it physically and conceptually. Under differ-
ent political, economic, and ecological circumstances, local
qualities of the landscape, such as its salinity, fluctuated be-
tween being detrimental and beneficial into the present day.
Over the long term, they find that the sustainability of local
regimes was unevenly determined by access to power rather
than the husbanding of resources.
Bauer (Chapter 9) looks at nonhuman actors to con-
sider the interactions between all materials and actors within
the South Indian Iron Age (1200–300 BCE) site of Central
Karnataka. This chapter continues the theme of demon-
strating the legacies of ancient constructions on the present
day. But Bauer’s explicit focus on “nonhumans” brings to
light the rich interconnection between all things and ac-
tors. In this case, the initial Iron Age construction of ar-
tificial reservoirs, retention walls, and the modification of
rock pools were manifestations of political behaviors that
continue to shape the way agropastoralists interact with
this environment today. Such manipulations of the environ-
ment also impacted soil, vegetation, and animals, which in
turn affect human action. Ultimately, this chapter asks us
to step away from the concept of human action and focus
more on the relational nexus of people, things, plants, and
animals.
Finally, Ashmore (Chapter 10) considers the reasons
why an archaeology of political ecology is relevant now,
from both a conceptual standpoint and also from a histori-
cal and engaged one. Her evaluation of the chapters builds
on the volume’s introduction by tracing individual papers’
consideration of several interlocking processes and themes.
Contributors’ considerations of unequal access to landscape
resources highlights the political economy of resource con-
trol and appropriation; how broader communities experi-
enced their milieu; and how these configurations shaped
and were shaped by landscapes. Her discussion of time-
frames stresses the relationships between the event and the
long term to elucidate both intended (short term) and un-
intended (long term) consequences. Finally, Ashmore’s dis-
cussion emphasizes that these papers offer an opportunity to
rethink and to historicize the very notion of nature itself and
Christopher T. Morehart, John K. Millhauser and Santiago Juarez
to move beyond culture–human versus nature–nonhuman
dichotomies.
Concluding Thoughts
Why should political ecology matter for archaeologists?
One reason is that archaeologists should demand a place in
the study of humans in their environments. In 2004, Robbins
noted that
the best-selling books that address [ecological change
and inequality] . . . insist that the disparity of nations is
a product of the shape of continents (Diamond 1997)
and that environmental crises are a statistical function
(Lomborg 2001). If political ecology has taught us any-
thing, it is that we can do better than that. (Robbins 2004,
217).
Archaeologists recently have taken up the call in response
to Diamond’s (2005) Collapse! (see McAnany and Yoffee
2010). Over the last two decades, Fagan (e.g., 1999, 2013)
has produced a string of books, aimed at a general audience,
that address how humans have responded to climate change
(for better or for worse) across time and space. But what
of growth, development, and inequality? We argue that an
archaeology of political ecology can address these issues
not only in the past. It can also demonstrate how present and
future possibilities emerge historically.
On the flip side, political ecology needs archaeology.
One of the underlying and problematic assumptions of po-
litical ecology is idea that “the role of politics in shaping
ecology is much greater today than in the past as a re-
sult of rapid social and technological changes that render
problematic the idea of a ‘natural’ environment” (Bryant
and Bailey 1997, 5–6). With a few important exceptions
(Håkansson 2008; Sluyter 2002, 2003), the time depth of
political ecology rarely extends beyond European colonial
expansion (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003, 13), even in re-
search increasingly labeled “Historical Political Ecology”
(e.g., Bell 2015; Davis 2009; Daura et al. 2016; Offen 2004;
Mathevet et al. 2015; Pires 2012). The long view of archae-
ology opens up new questions for empirical investigation
and can contribute directly to conversations with political
ecologists whose work is based in the present day. Further-
more, many of the material subjects of archaeological inves-
tigation continue to endure into and shape the present day,
whether they are terraces that have lasted for millennia or
second-growth forests.
Archaeology matters. An archaeology of political ecol-
ogy can foreground the political nature of our own work.
Archaeology influences what people know, think, and be-
lieve about the land and their places within land. We are
Archaeologies of Political Ecology – Genealogies, Problems, and Orientations
“empowered” agents of present-day political ecologies to
the extent that we document, highlight, or hide aspects of the
landscape and of history. Archaeologists’ actions influence
possibilities for countless people who depend on the histo-
ries and the landscapes that we study. A political ecological
approach is not the only way in which archaeologists can
engage with the present, but it offers a “powerful” means to
foster collaboration and integration between many disparate
researchers to do so.
Vayda and Walters (1999) criticized political ecology
for its emphasis on politics over the detailed, empirical
studies of ecology. Similarly, more empirically oriented
political ecologists (e.g., Blaikie’s work) have been criti-
cized for underspecifying the multiple dimensions through
which politics shape power (see Forsyth 2008). Given
archaeologists’ expertise in studying the relational nature
of material processes, places, and things across time and
space, we are uniquely positioned to respond to or overcome
both these critiques. In other words, we see this volume as
an invitation—especially as an invitation to our colleagues
who have moved forward with projects to demonstrate how
archaeology can affect change in the present day (Cobb
2014; Kintigh et al. 2014).
Acknowledgments
This volume grew out of a symposium on archaeol-
ogy and political ecology that we organized for the Annual
Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in
Chicago in November 2013. This chapter, and this volume,
would not have been possible without the support of the Ar-
chaeology Division of the American Anthropological Asso-
ciation and the contributions of all of the participants in the
original AAA session. We are grateful to those participants
who offered significant contributions to the symposium but
were not able to participate in present volume: Mark Hauser,
Amanda Logan, and June Nash. We thank Lynne Goldstein
and Chris Pool for their patient support in preparing this
work for publication as well as the anonymous reviewers.
Charlotte Cable’s careful editing and suggestions helped us
to produce a much better written, argued, and integrated final
manuscript. Along the way, we have benefitted from conver-
sations with Kristin De Lucia, Michaela DeSoucey, Michelle
Hegmon, and Joel Palka as well as the support of our col-
leagues at Arizona State University, Georgia State Univer-
sity, North Carolina State University, and the University of
Illinois, Chicago. Finally, we recognize the intellectual in-
spiration of Elizabeth Brumfiel, Tim Earle, Cynthia Robin,
James Brown, Mary Weismantel, and Micaela di Leonardo,
anthropologists who challenged us see the past as political.
19
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