ABSTRACT
We often use metaphors as an aid to understanding complexity, none more so perhaps than in understanding nature and our relationship within it. These metaphors are inevitably bound up in philosophies of the environment, or knowledge of how the environment works and the technology available to us to modify/ameliorate our surrounding environment. Thus for millennia, environmental knowledge was enshrined in folklore derived from the trial and error experiences of ancestors. Archaeology has revealed patterns of site selection which changed as we developed primitive technologies or adapted to new environments. Places for habitation had to satisfy the needs for water, food, raw materials, shelter and safety, and humans learnt to recognise those sites that offered the greatest potential for their mode of existence. Examples are numerous: caves near the feeding or watering places of animals; Neolithic cultivation of well-drained, easily worked river terraces; early fishing communities on raised beaches behind sheltered bays and so on. Undoubtedly mistakes were made and communities decimated, but those that survived learnt to observe certain environmental truths or inevitabilities.
