This conversation began as a roundtable at the 2023 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. The roundtable was part of the Executive Program and was intended as a follow-up to Kisha Supernant’s keynote presentation, which was entitled ‘Truth before transition. Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice.’ Considering the sensitive nature of the topic, we responded to a selection of written questions from the audience rather than taking open questions. The discussion was webcast, then transcribed and redacted. This article includes a portion of the question period as well as a contextual introduction that was not part of the initial conversation.

In recent years, alongside increasing interest in collapse narratives, Mediterranean landscape archaeologists have turned to resilience theory and concepts like sustainability to examine the complexity of social responses to environmental stress and to counter a predominant focus on catastrophism and decline. Yet the revamping of systems theory has its pitfalls, most notably in its reductionist language, its sidelining of human agency and its privileging of normative claims of success or failure. In this paper I build on cross-disciplinary critiques of resilience to highlight problems with metrics of stability or vulnerability, macrohistorical functionalism, patchy material chronologies and the obscuring of social dynamics. I argue that research on past human–environment relationships needs more attention to landscape time and smaller-scale practices, and advocate studying the political dimensions that structured how past communities created and managed liveable conditions in uneven ways.

This provocation seeks to stimulate discussion by highlighting an alternative way of looking at the actions of destruction and creation, not as opposing forces but as an ongoing process of transformation. Destruction encompasses a variety of material and symbolic transformations, which go hand in hand with the creation of new possibilities. Therefore, destruction is not an antagonism to creation but – following Karen Barad’s agential realism – a mode of intra-active becoming. Far from being a theory in its own right, this paper presents a perspective that opens up the possibility of encountering archaeological discourses of destruction and creation from a posthumanist lens.

This paper proposes an ecological framework for understanding medieval mining towns as dynamic socio-ecological systems shaped by flows of matter, energy, capital and information. Drawing on concepts from human and political ecology, it examines how mining, technology and power structures interacted to produce feedback loops and tipping points that transformed both society and the environment. A case study of Kutná Hora (Czechia) illustrates these mechanisms, showing how the discovery of silver triggered cycles of population growth, technological innovation and capital accumulation, whilst also causing deforestation, pollution and social stratification. The study highlights how medieval mining towns functioned as adaptive, self-organizing systems embedded in global economic networks, revealing early forms of extractive capitalism and environmental change. This ecological perspective offers a heuristic model for analysing historical urban environments and their long-term sustainability, bridging archaeology, history and environmental science.