Wiley-Online-Library: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association: Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The state of the field: Emerging approaches to the archaeology of agricultural landscapes

Jesse Casana, Madeleine McLeester — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

Almost 30 years ago, Naomi Miller and Katheryn Gleason edited the influential volume, The Archaeology of Garden and Field, a guide to the identification and interpretation of evidence for past agricultural practice inscribed within the landscape. Here we introduce a new collection of papers that advance both theoretical discourses and methodological approaches to the study of ancient field systems. Contemporary archaeological debates bring new urgency to explorations of relict agricultural features, as they offer powerful perspectives on the entanglements of humans with their environment in the Anthropocene, while also serving to decolonize the past through engagement with Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. Although many ancient fields are at dire risk of destruction or have already been lost to modern land-use changes, an emerging suite of new technologies and innovative methods are now enabling archaeologists to find and interpret past agricultural systems as never before. Herein, we argue for the critical importance of archaeological investigations that prioritize discovery and interpretation of relict fields and their constitution within larger landscapes, both as a means to better understand people in the past as well as our role as a species in shaping global ecosystems.

Chapter 3. Cultivating problems and politics: Precarious fields and the social history of the Medieval Deccan, southern India

Andrew M. Bauer — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

This paper assesses the shifting locations and social significance of agricultural spaces through analyses of intensive pedestrian survey results, multi-spectral remote sensing data, and Medieval Period inscriptional records around the site of Maski (Raichur District, Karnataka). In doing so, it challenges a longstanding historiographical trope about the social history and essential “fertility” of the Raichur Doab, a region of the central Deccan of southern India that was ostensibly contested for its rich agricultural resources by numerous imperial polities throughout the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The results suggest that cultivation was extended into the region's more marginal production environments between the 11th and 14th centuries. Moreover, the process of agricultural expansion appears to have partly contributed to fomenting social concerns about the effects of temple patronage as many of the region's underclass farmers faced multiple modes of precarity, including those engendered by new labor and cultivation conditions in the semi-arid Deccan. In that sense, the paper also expands on contemporary notions of precarity and highlights the significance of a variety of ways through which conditions of precarity might emerge in other historical contexts.

Chapter 4. Locating field systems in the southern Peruvian Andes

BrieAnna S. Langlie, David W. Mixter, Carlos Osores Mendives, John Wilson — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

In this paper, we review current understandings of anthropogenic field systems, focusing on trends and variations in the chronology of field construction, use, and in some cases, abandonment, as well as labor organization of agrarian production across the Lake Titicaca Basin. These trends indicate that agricultural intensification increased both during the political centralization of the Tiwanaku state and during periods of political fragmentation. In contrast to prior work on fields in the region, we argue that there was no single cultural, environmental, or historical impetus that ignited the construction of any particular field type. Additionally, we present the results of pedestrian survey of terraces carried out in 2018 in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin. While there were regional commonalities across survey areas in the masonry design of terrace risers, presence of pathways and radiating walls separating vertical tracts of terraces, and a general absence of irrigation, we found deviations from each of these trends in individual terrace complexes. While preliminary evidence indicates that more terraces were built or cultivated during the Late Intermediate period (1100–1450 CE) than in other time periods in the northern Titicaca basin, some terraces were likely built earlier. Our findings point to the multiplicity of strategies that ancient farmers employed in the varied ecological settings of the Lake Titicaca basin under diverse sociopolitical programs. This contrasts with previous research on agrarian field systems, which is mostly single-sited and tends to emphasize individual strategies over the quiver of agrarian options available to Andean farmers.

Chapter 6. Found field: Encountering a ridged garden bed archaeological site, Wing Reach, in Wisconsin, USA

Madeleine McLeester, Jesse Casana, Peter Geraci, Alison Anastasio — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

Raised garden beds were once among the most common Native American earthworks in eastern North America. Typically located on prime agricultural land, they are now among the rarest. However, previously unrecorded archaeological raised beds can still be uncovered, especially in more marginal agricultural settings. This chapter details the discovery of a previously unrecorded ancestral Native American ridged agricultural field site in Juneau County, Wisconsin, USA. The site was first identified in 2020 by the authors using publicly available historical aerial imagery and a recent lidar survey. Here we describe its confirmation as a ridged field archaeological site and emplace it within broader anthropogenic landscapes of Wisconsin. Methods described herein can be employed globally to locate and document raised bed agriculture.

Chapter 7. Mapping land use with integrated environmental archaeological datasets

John M. Marston, Petra Vaiglova — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

Archaeologists have developed tools to reconstruct the locations of farming and animal herding using ecological and digital modeling of ancient landscapes. The determination of where on a landscape farming and herding took place, however, can remain elusive in environments with evidence for substantial geomorphological and/or ecological change since the period of occupation. Archaeobotanical and geoarchaeological evidence from the site of Gordion, in central Anatolia, indicates substantial landscape change over the last 4000 years, including deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and alluviation. These have been inferred to be the result of past agricultural practices, but no firm evidence has pointed to specific locations (geographic and temporal) where ancient farming and herding may have caused these changes. Integrating extant archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and geoarchaeological evidence with new isotopic data provides a more detailed reconstruction of the sequence of agricultural practices that shaped the present landscape and ecology of the region, offering a model for future archaeological research within substantially transformed landscapes.

Chapter 5. Finding and understanding ancient irrigated agricultural fields in southern Arizona

M. Kyle Woodson — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

For over a century, archaeologists have investigated the vast network of prehistoric Hohokam canal irrigation systems in the lower Salt River and middle Gila River valleys, as well as in other areas of southern Arizona. However, documentation of the agricultural fields in which prehistoric farmers irrigated their crops generally was lacking until the last 25 years. This is largely a result of the difficulty in identifying ancient fields, since they are not visible on the surface and have been obscured or destroyed by natural landscape processes as well as historic and modern disturbances. More recent archaeological investigations have revealed ancient irrigated fields through innovative methods and excavation techniques. The fields were constructed both by Hohokam irrigators (450–1450 CE) as well as by farmers from preceding cultural traditions during the Early Agricultural period (2100 BCE–50 CE). These discoveries occurred during projects conducted in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. In this chapter, I highlight these important studies that have expanded the view of ancient agricultural landscapes in southern Arizona.

Chapter 8. Isotopic evidence for protohistoric field locations in northeastern Illinois

Mark R. Schurr, Madeleine McLeester — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

In the western Great Lakes region of the United States, late prehistoric and early historic Indigenous fields are often difficult to investigate because their archaeological signatures are faint and easily destroyed. They have been identified largely via rare remnants of raised fields and historical records. With the majority of Indigenous fields destroyed, important aspects of cultivation remain ambiguous, especially the ecology of cultivated areas. In addition to archaeological indicators of field location, the choice of specific environmental settings (prairie, wetland, upland forest, etc.) can be encoded in the stable isotope ratios of cultigens. Stable carbon- and nitrogen-isotope ratios of maize kernels and wood charcoal from the Middle Grant Creek site (11WI2739), an early 17th century village in northeastern Illinois, are used to better understand agricultural practices during one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age.

Chapter 10. Intensification does not require modification: Tropical Swidden and the Maya

Anabel Ford — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

What is involved in finding fields? Agricultural intensification and its archaeological correlates are not always obvious. Archaeologists frequently equate capital-based investment and arable farming as the sole path to intensified production. The presence of terraces to slow water flows across land, canals to bring water to drier lands, and raised and drained fields to reduce water, are methods to bring marginal lands into productive use. Labor-based economies, especially those of the Americas before European conquest, present an entirely distinct pathway toward intensification based on tending the landscape. Tropical societies in general, and the Maya in particular, demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of the natural world, cultivating biological capital as a product of their culture with skill, hand tools, scheduling, and fire. Asynchronous and embedded fields transform into forests in a poly-cultivation practice, emphasizing the diversity that prevails in tropical woodlands. As with most traditional land-use systems around the world, the Maya milpa cycle reduces temperature and evapotranspiration, conserves water, maintains biodiversity, builds soil fertility, inhibits erosion, and nurtures people. Labor investments per se do not leave direct evidence on the landscape, apart from the implicit density of settlement, yet the imprint of their management lies in the forest landscape itself.

Chapter 11. Finding fields: Concluding remarks

Naomi F. Miller — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

Ancient agricultural landscapes are increasingly recognized as a vital subject of archaeological inquiry, the study of which requires methods and approaches of the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. This chapter identifies three recurring themes addressed variously in the contributions to this volume that demonstrate the broad relevance of agricultural landscapes to an understanding of ancient society: globalization and hierarchy, niche construction, and memory embedded in agricultural practice and material traces of ancient fields.

Chapter 9. Feral fields of Northern Dalmatia (Croatia)

James Countryman, Gregory Zaro, Ante Blaće, Martina Čelhar — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

How do we identify ancient fields and farming systems in areas where the same spaces of cultivation have been used repeatedly over thousands of years? In the limestone karst landscapes of northern Dalmatia, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, drystone field walls, terraces, and cairns are common features that attest to generations of working the land for agriculture. While confounding archaeological objects due to complex histories of reuse, drystone terraced field systems throughout the Mediterranean are believed to have roots in ancient and prehistoric land use. Against this backdrop, this paper works to better understand the dynamic patterns and outcomes of field “recycling” through multiple lines of evidence for long-term changes in cropping patterns and agroecology in multi-millennial agricultural landscapes of northern Dalmatia. We compare archaeobotanical data from the Ravni Kotari plain to documents of preindustrial land use from the 1826 Franciscan cadastre. We also draw upon contemporary observations of traditionally managed, semi-wild olive groves on the nearby Adriatic island of Ugljan to better understand the land-use legacies inherent in the landscapes of northern Dalmatia today. These data show that, despite a relatively static agricultural built environment of field walls and terraces, Dalmatian communities held historically dynamic relationships with domesticated and wild plant ecologies. Prehistoric integration of cereal agriculture with wild forest resources appears to have shifted to commercial-scale domesticated arboriculture in the Classical period, leaving a multifaceted legacy of commercial agriculture, traditional farming, and rewilding among the contemporary cultural landscapes of Dalmatia.

Chapter 2. Stone by stone: Women's quotidian farm labor and the construction of the Khutwaneng farmscape in Bokoni, South Africa

Alex Schoeman — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Abstract

The ruins of stone-walled towns, villages, and homesteads mark the residential nodes of Bokoni, a polity that thrived in northeastern South Africa from the late 15th to the early 19th century and extended over about 30 000 km². These residential structures are generally observable on aerial photographs and satellite imagery, but with a few exceptions, the terraced gardens and fields are less visible. Lidar data from one of Bokoni's towns—Khutwaneng—has made finding the fields easier. In this 17th to early 19th-century town, all homesteads have adjacent terraced gardens or fields, irrespective of whether they are well-established or newly built. Lidar imagery of terraces that were being built in newly established homesteads supports the view that most terraces grew over time and were the result of quotidian actions by farmers. The pervasiveness of terraces throughout the town suggests that urban farming was an entrenched component of Bokoni's urban life. In southern Africa, daily farming duties were historically performed by women, and it is likely that this was also the case in Bokoni. Understanding the terraces as the product of women's quotidian labor allows for reflection on the role that women and their actions as farmers played in shaping the Khutwaneng farmscape, and it in shaping them.

List of contributors

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 125-126, July 2024.

Finding Fields: The Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes

Madeleine McLeester and Jesse Casana, Guest Editors — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:00:12 -0700

Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 1-4, July 2024.