From causation to cause

Contreras, Daniel (ed.). The archaeology of human-environment interactions: strategies for investigating anthropogenic landscapes, dynamic environments, and climate change in the human past. 2017. xiv+268 pages, several b&w illustrations. New York: Routledge; 978-1-138-90173-5 hardback £85.

Foster II, H. Thomas, Paciulli, Lisa M. & Goldstein, David J. (ed.). Viewing the future in the past: historical ecology applications to environmental issues. 2016. viii+186 pages, 37 b&w illustrations. Columbia (SC): The University of South Carolina Press; 978-1-61117-586-8 hardback $34.95.

In a recent Antiquity paper, Todd Braje (Reference Braje2016) and others debated the concept of the Anthropocene, a period defined by human influence over climate, geology and environment. There is little scientific dispute about the role of humans in climate change and declining biodiversity in the present, but what about in the past? When did humans begin to change their environments? (Or put another way, when did the environment cease to shape humans?) And what can we learn from these past societies in confronting the challenges of today? The first volume under review, The archaeology of human-environment interactions: strategies for investigating anthropogenic landscapes, dynamic environments, and climate change in the human past, edited by Daniel Contreras, explores the significance of archaeological evidence for these questions. In particular, it focuses on the issue of correlation versus causation. Given the fragmentary nature of most archaeological data, and their often coarse chronological resolution, can we confidently link phenomena such as urbanisation with deforestation, or drought with societal collapse? Contreras highlights the “epistemological fragility and [the] logical insufficiency” (p. 11) of simple correlation-based narratives.

The Introduction provides a brief review of the history of archaeological work on human-environment relations. Contreras suggests that although archaeological interest in the environment started early, serious study did not commence until the final third of the twentieth century; historical geographers, he suggests, were much quicker off the mark and more influential on the development of ideas. Nonetheless, archaeologists then moved swiftly through phases of environmental determinism, cultural determinism and most recently, he argues, back to environmental determinism. The latter is somewhat surprising given that the rise of the Anthropocene concept firmly attributes agency to humans rather than to the environment. Less surprising is that Contreras charts a course between the determinists, environmental and cultural, emphasising “mutually constitutive human-environment interactions” (p. 5). He argues for the need to look critically at “suggestive correlations” (p. 9) and to develop research on linking mechanisms. Key to this is the ability to vary analytical scale and perspective; in line with several of the other volumes under review, Contreras calls for a return to the local, not as a postmodern retreat, but rather as the foundation for more robust regional and global analysis.

The nine case-study chapters deal with examples from Brazil, Jordan, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru and the USA. These range widely in subject matter and methods, from acorn exploitation on the California coast to terra preta formation in the central Amazon, and from geoarchaeological work in highland Mexico to GIS modelling of the location of pastoralist sites in Mongolia. The studies range in date from the Epipalaeolithic in Jordan through to the Classic period in the American Southwest. To highlight the diversity of techniques required to study past human-environment relations, each chapter concludes with a methodological summary intended to demonstrate a key technique and its application, including landscape palaeobotany (Jordan) and soil geochemistry (Hawaiʻi). Collectively, the case studies emphasise the need to improve the robustness of interpretations of past human-environment interactions, based on higher-resolution data and on better interpretive frameworks.

The volume concludes with reflective comments by Hayashida. She echoes the observations of Contreras in his Introduction by noting the growing demand for historical environmental data but the limited usage of archaeological evidence within such interdisciplinary research. This reinforces Contreras's point but does not explain it. An important question must be whether other scientists find our data insufficiently robust, or whether, through academic hyper-specialisation, there is simply a lack of awareness of what archaeology has to offer. In summing up the influence of culture, politics and agency on human-environment relations—for example, through social strategies of cooperation, centralisation or coercion—Hayashida touches briefly on topics that are central to the other volumes under review, such as path dependency (Johnson, below) and trade-offs (Hegmon, below). Yet only in the final couple of paragraphs of the book does Hayashida turn to the relevance of such research for the present, and for the future. For the next three books, this relevance is front and centre.

Viewing the future in the past: historical ecology applications to environmental issues, edited by Foster, Paciulli and Goldstein, takes the impact of people on the environment as a given: “A study of the Holocene requires including humans as a causal factor” (p. 1) of environmental problems; indeed, “Holocene ecology is anthropogenic ecology” (p. 2). Instead of the knotty problem of causation, the volume focuses on how the study of the past can contribute to an understanding of the present and to the formulation of strategies for the future. The title of the editors’ Introduction is nothing if not ambitious: ‘How archaeology and historical sciences can save the world’. Certainly, some archaeologists of late seem to be brimming with confidence about their ability to make a ‘useful’ contribution to society. That contribution, as made clear here, seems to focus on two related areas, providing long-term perspectives and elucidating human-environment interaction (see Kintigh et al. Reference Kintigh, Altschul, Beaudry, Drennan, Kinzig, Kohler, Limp, Maschner, Michener, Pauketat, Peregrine, Sabloff, Wilkinson and Zeder2014, but not cited in this volume). Yet, title notwithstanding, the editors’ Introduction alone is not going to save the planet—it is brief and focuses on case studies rather than any overarching themes, theories or lessons that characterise the following chapters. Certainly, there is no single dominant approach running through these contributions; as with the Contreras volume, there is great geographic, chronological and methodological diversity on show.

Chapters include the modelling of ‘calorific landscapes’ on the US coast of Georgia during the Late Mississippian period, and two contributions on aspects of resilience in the Puebloan Southwest. The case studies are predominantly based in the USA, with others in France, Iraq and Mexico. The latter, by Christopher Morehart, deals with maize agriculture at Xaltocan during the first half of the second millennium AD. He examines the evidence for decreasing diversity of maize varieties, coupled with the concurrent increase in dependency on maize generally. He understands these shifts in the context of changing social and political frameworks, particularly the payment of tribute: “The standardization of agriculture developed as farming households and their relationships became increasingly tied to and dependent upon the stability and sustainability not of the ecological milieu but, instead, of the state itself” (p. 28). In this way, Morehart emphasises the connection between reduced biodiversity, or greater standardisation, and wider social and political contexts—whether historical empire or contemporary globalisation. In another chapter, Hritz and Pournelle examine Mesopotamia, contrasting the cyclical growth and decline of the northern (Akkad) and southern (Sumer) alluvial areas and the ‘Sealands’, or the delta at the head of the Gulf. Using microtopography extracted from remotely sensed images, they trace the long-term effects of niche construction. As the delta migrated south, cities had to expend greater effort to maintain agricultural production, becoming more dependent on irrigation systems; downstream, however, new opportunities opened up. Both of these papers emphasise the importance of social and political frameworks for environmental systems. How they might be applied to contemporary environmental issues is not directly stated.

Other papers focus on the present. Disproving the concept of nominative determinism, Sarah Quick considers ‘slow food’ and ‘gourmet heritage’. She examines a South Carolina mill that is reviving ‘heirloom grains’, especially rice, and promoting sustainable production based on past agricultural techniques, although without resurrecting the associated slave-based labour regimes.

The papers range from the heavily quantitative to the purely reflective. There are examples of optimism about the role of archaeology in providing viable models and materials to help save the planet, but also notes of pessimism—concluding his study of the fragile ecosystem of the Great Plains, Braun is blunt: “ecological sustainability cannot be reached under any economic system that necessitates constant growth” (p. 142). All are clear, however, that there is no silver bullet. Saving the planet will need to be done one step at a time, with local solutions that aggregate into global results. Many of the case studies featured in this collection, and in the other volumes under review, document environments, especially arid ones, that are particularly susceptible to climate change. It is less clear, however, whether these locations are representative of the most vulnerable environments or the most pressing future challenges: there is nothing, for example, on the Arctic or on heavily urbanised landscapes. This volume offers interesting and valuable individual case studies, but they do not amount to a global manifesto. For that we must turn to our next book.

Kicking the can down the road

Johnson, Scott A.J.. Why did ancient civilizations fail? 2016. xiii+293 pages, several b&w illustrations. New York & London: Routledge; 978-62958-283-2 paperback £29.99.

Hegmon, Michelle. The give and take of sustainability: archaeological and anthropological perspectives on tradeoffs. 2017. xvi+299 pages, several b&w illustrations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-07833-8 hardback £75.

Across the first 12 chapters of his book, Why did ancient civilizations fail?, Scott Johnson focuses squarely on societies of the past: the Maya, Mesopotamia, Rome, Egypt, the Aztecs and Incas. His final chapter, however, turns to ‘Where we are today’—or perhaps more accurately, what we should be doing today if we wish to avoid the same fate as earlier civilisations.

As with the contributors to the Contreras volume (above), Johnson is wary of confusing correlation with causation. Societies may collapse at times of war and environmental change, but caution is required before arguing for any causal link. He is also clear that there is rarely a single cause of collapse; everything is interconnected. Hence, Johnson states that while other accounts focus on “the final straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back, I am focused on the entire bale of hay” (p. 5). Johnson's recognition of the complexity of causation contrasts with the simplicity of his underlying explanation: social hubris. Or, more specifically, the failure to adapt to change. Johnson largely avoids the term ‘collapse’ (“overuse of this term has diluted the idea”, p. 6) and, in particular, he stresses that we tend to define collapse in relation to elite culture rather than the experience of wider society or the “ordinary citizens [who] tend to muddle through transitions and adapt to a new normal” (p. 7). He identifies five ‘points of failure’: environment, agriculture, trade, society and catastrophes. The book is divided into pairs of chapters alternating between discussion of each of these ‘points of failure’ and an extended case study (agriculture is so essential that it also receives an additional chapter, directly after the Introduction).

The role of environment (Chapter 3) is paired with the example of the Maya (Chapter 4). Here, Johnson considers the effects of drought and soil erosion and the different technological and social responses to them. He concludes, “It was hubris on the part of the Classic Maya to assume that their system could continue without adapting to meet the needs of a changing world” (p. 63). But if so, such hubris was understandable, and Johnson asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of Maya rulers and to look at their response without the benefit of hindsight. In a similar way, the importance of trade systems (Chapter 7) is exemplified by Rome (Chapter 8). But, as with the other case studies, Johnson is careful not to attribute the ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire to this single cause. The decline of trade across the Roman world was a result of the growing capacity of the provinces to produce and exchange goods regionally, but there was a multitude of other challenges: environmental, military and religious. Perhaps most significant, however, was that the growth of the empire was based on expansion, sucking in new resources from outside, so that when military expansion eventually did come to an end, greater surplus had to be extracted from the finite resources within the system—a lesson for our own day if ever there were one.

And the final chapter turns precisely to this subject with a manifesto for the future. Johnson is here cognisant of accusations of tree-hugging or of tyranny: he is not “an advocate of living like hobbits or ewoks in some misguided romantic vision of a science fiction idyll” (p. 235), or even “an enviro-socialist dictator” (p. 259)! And he is well aware of the scale of not only the environmental but also the socio-political challenge; for example, the need “to decrease global wealth disparities” is labelled a “sensitive topic, which often engenders the epithet ‘Marxist!’”, p. 256). Undaunted, he hopes to convince us through the power of rational argument to act individually and collectively before the challenges become too great.

The proposed solutions range from the small changes that we can each make today to the more radical, long-term changes that will require collective action. These problems and solutions are tackled in the same order as his chapters: environment, agriculture, trade, society and catastrophes. Hence, we need to wean ourselves off carbon-based energy; we need more local and sustainable agriculture; we should aim to produce more locally and to trade only when necessary, and we need to prioritise quality over quantity, and experience over things. As Johnson himself notes, none of these solutions are new; his aim here is to link them and to give them historical depth. One solution that is definitely not on the cards, however, is population control. Indeed, Johnson stresses that there are not, contra Malthus, too many people, but rather that we live in the wrong places and that we have learnt to consume too much. Interestingly, in contrast to much recent research and policy that sees denser, urban living as more sustainable, Johnson finds city life problematic, socially as well as environmentally.

Given the diagnosis, and the difficulty of making the patient swallow the medicine, Johnson remains impressively optimistic in tone; notably, the term ‘social hubris’, which he applies, to our ancestors, scarcely appears in his final chapter—there is every hope that the patient will take the doctor's advice. Johnson concludes that “We are [. . .] facing the choice between voluntary but controllable sacrifices or involuntary and uncontrolled collapse” (p. 237). That offers a straightforward choice between two distinct futures. But, of course, it is not as simple as deciding whether to have lasagne or pizza for dinner. There are complex considerations that play out across time and space, between social and economic organisations, between nations, generations and corporations. It is, therefore, no surprise that this precise example appears on the first page of the next volume under review.

Introducing The give and take of sustainability: archaeological and anthropological perspectives on tradeoffs, editor Michelle Hegmon observes that “Living within environmental limits may be good for the long term but it prevents some people from meeting their needs today” (p. 1). How can these competing goals be reconciled? The answer for some time has been sustainable development, but the concept has come in for critical examination: “Sustain what? Sustain it for whom? Sustain it for how long? Sustain it at what cost?” (p. 8). The answers to these questions implicate choices or trade-offs between current and future generations, between developing and developed nations, between rich and poor, between humans and other species. Where Johnson's stark binary choice, with one option so unimaginable that any sane person would choose the ‘sacrifice’ (or not choose at all), Hegmon sees a whole spectrum of choices accumulating into an outcome. The overarching aim of the volume is to explore how past societies have dealt with trade-offs, and to contribute to policy and decision-making in the contemporary world.

As with the previous volumes, a variety of case studies is presented. Some of these introduce new regions to the mix, such as the Faroe Islands, Ghana, India and New Guinea; others are already familiar, including Mexico (more maize!), the Southwest USA and the Pacific coast of North America. The Maya make an appearance in all of the books reviewed so far; their environmental challenges and eventual ‘collapse’ seem to hold up a compelling mirror to our own society. Hence, in this volume, through a comparison of different areas of the Maya lowlands, Isendahl and Heckbert identify a correlation between the scarcity of water, the levels of investment in water management and the degree of social complexity. Alert, however, to the ghost of Wittfoegel, they argue that investment in water management was a product rather than a cause of social complexity. The trade-off was not only between up-front investment and long-term increases in production, but also between increased production and greater path dependency, that is, the locking of actions into particular historical trajectories, even as these become increasingly costly and ultimately unsustainable. Many of the chapters touch on themes and concepts that are explicitly or implicitly covered in the volumes reviewed above; path dependence, for example, features in chapters such as Hritz and Pournelle in Foster et al., and Johnson develops a similar Maya case study.

In her chapter, on the Mimbres region of New Mexico, Hegmon tracks growth and prosperity through much of the Classic period, but the costs of inter-generational trade-offs led to food, environmental and security problems by the early twelfth century AD, and, ultimately, to depopulation. Suggesting that the successes of the Mimbres Classic were built on unsustainable foundations might be seen as “a negative, even churlish view” (p. 166), but Hegmon stresses that her aim is not to “find fault with them, but to understand their decisions, including the consequences and trade offs that result from those decisions, and to learn from them” (p. 166). Those lessons include the significance of inequality, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits and the need for better appreciation of the perspective of those affected by, rather than making, trade-offs.

In the final chapter, Hornborg casts a critical eye over proceedings. This is an interesting inclusion, raising as it does some deep concerns about the trade-off concept. He does not mince his words: “I view the very discourse on calculation and decision-making as a mystification of the possibly disastrous consequences of the current organization of world society” (p. 273). He continues, “the narratives that tend to dominate public consciousness are selected less for their accuracy or rationality than for their capacity to provide existential comfort” (p. 273). This resonates with Johnson's ‘social hubris’ (above), but seems to go further by implying that we are not simply locked into certain behaviours because we cannot perceive alternatives, but rather that we are actively creating narratives to counter them. In particular, he is concerned about the use of economic language and concepts, such as cost-benefit analysis, in both historical and contemporary contexts that “represent the colonization of ecology by economics” (p. 275). He also questions whether the trade-off concept implies or requires rational decision-making. As archaeologists, we have the benefit of hindsight; we can see the outcomes of actions or inaction. For the actors themselves, those outcomes were unknown. And who exactly were the actors—individuals, groups or states? And who did not have agency? Were actors able to perceive the ‘decisions’ that needed to be made? And did they implement a rational cost-benefit analysis?

It is interesting to compare this volume with Johnson's Why did ancient civilizations fail? In asking what we might learn from the past to bring about a better future, they share an aim. But they speak different languages. As Hegmon observes in her Introduction, words have ‘power’, and the language of trade-offs is embedded in the powerful discourse of economics: costs and benefits, gains and losses. In contrast, Johnson asks us to rethink completely such metrics and to redefine value itself. In short, one asks us to adopt the language of the current global rulebook; the other asks us to throw out the rulebook and start afresh.

Wooden ships on the water

Rich, Sara A.. Cedar forest, cedar ships: allure, lore, and metaphor in the Mediterranean Near East. 2017. xii+283 pages, numerous b&w illustrations. Oxford: Archaeopress; 978-1-78491-365-6 paperback £44.

To give some perspective on all these attempts to save the planet, we can turn to Cedar forest, cedar ships: allure, lore, and metaphor in the Mediterranean Near East by Sara Rich. This is a complex and compelling account that ranges widely across genres and ideas in pursuit—or perhaps more appropriately, under the spell—of cedar forests and the objects hewn from their wood. Rich's Prologue introduces her object-oriented ontological approach. In contrast with the volumes above, which take humans as their focus (e.g. as agents affecting the environment or the question of how we sustain the natural world for future humans), Rich adopts the perspective of the cedar forest, exploring how these trees have exerted influence over humans.

The Prologue lays out Rich's approach, drawing on feminist, ecological and object theories to explore cedar forests through concepts such as ‘weird realism’ and ‘speculative fictions’. The three chapters of Part 1 are ordered chronologically. Chapter 1 deals with prehistory; Chapter 2 narrates “how cedar forests seduced human leaders of the ancient world into making systematic pilgrimages, penetrating the wooded mountains of the East Mediterranean and seeking divine permission before taking souvenirs in the form of timber” (p. 47). These humans—Egyptian pharaohs, Babylonian rulers and Persian kings—were seduced by the physical and symbolic properties of these trees. Such allure was, however, not universal; during the Classical period, Greeks and Romans demonstrated limited fascination with either the forests or their wood. Subsequently, the new religious and philosophical landscapes of the Christian and Muslim eras led to a revival of reverence and new lore and metaphorical meanings.

Part 2 shifts from the cedar forests to cedar ships, and examines the textual, archaeological and iconographical evidence for the ‘The potency of wood on water’. Cedar ships, whether Egyptian mortuary barques, merchant vessels or Ptolemaic warships, created rich symbolism: “the wooden ship as a ‘collection’ was a living metaphor for negotiating the unpredictable forces of sea and sky and the unknowable distance of time and space” (p. 175). Chapter 5 uses strontium isotope analysis to trace the provenance of ship timbers; Pharaoh Senwosret III's (Carnegie) funerary boat, for example, was constructed with cedar traced to the forests of northern Lebanon. Timber from each different location came pre-loaded with cargoes of meaning that the shipwright, or “occult technician” (p. 197), worked into vessels. The absence of cedar from Roman and Late Antique shipwrecks, and the preference for fir and other more easily accessible species, indicates a shift in the allure of cedar for seafaring. During the Classical period, “A ship lost at sea was merely a matter of lost money and manpower, not necessarily a loss of divine approval. Abandoning gods to the superstitious past also meant a dismissal of ideational associations with mountains and forests and seas” (p. 199).

The Epilogue (a substantial chapter in its own right) returns to our theme of human-environment interactions and saving the planet. Conservation efforts to halt and reverse deforestation around the Eastern Mediterranean are here set in historical context. The motivations for such work are seen as teleological, serving to satisfy human needs such as wood or tourism, rather than the needs of the trees themselves. Nonetheless, Rich concedes that various laws and conservation schemes over the past 150 years have indeed helped to restore the forests. In this sense, cedars demonstrate a level of “plant autonomy” (p. 220) akin to the idea of wild wheat inducing humans to ‘domesticate’ it. There are, however, dangers ahead: insect pests, forest fires and climate change. Each individually is a threat; collectively, they conspire to exacerbate one another's effects: higher temperatures leading to more fires; drought-stressed trees succumbing to pests. Rich argues that cedar forests are survivors, living through ice ages and able to fight back against human deforestation. But after millennia of exploitation, “now is the time to return the favor” (p. 238). Still, Rich worries that the very concept of conservation, pitting Nature in opposition and subservience to Culture, may not be enough. An object-oriented philosophy encourages us to think about what these forests ‘want’.

Cedar forest, cedar ships defies categorisation. Its varied inspirations and materials are woven into a unique account, pursuing multiple theoretical and thematic objectives. Rich confesses to being “bewitched by the seducing cedars’ power of allure” (p. 239), and her passion for her subject matter comes through on each page. In the context of the other books under review, Cedar forests, cedar ships is particularly valuable for the way in which it seeks to reconcile the natural sciences and the humanities. As the other volumes make clear, saving the planet will take more than the rational application of science; it will also take understanding of how and why people create meaning and value.

Many of the archaeological case studies covered in the books reviewed here provide the contemporary world with models for how we might live more sustainably, as well as examples of the consequences of ‘business as usual’. These lessons seem to be part of the discipline of archaeology, demonstrating its relevance to society in very practical ways. But can the past be reduced to lessons that either (negatively) warn or (positively) instruct us on how to live today? As argued by Harari, above, the present and the past are fundamentally different; instead, “Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past [. . .] to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine” (Harari Reference Harari2017: 69). In other words, living like our predecessors—eating ‘ancient grains’ or ‘going palaeo’—will not save the planet. Rather, studying the past reveals that human societies can organise themselves in radically different ways, and therefore radically different futures are possible too.