ABSTRACT
The collected chapters in this volume explore the challenges and possibilities of explaining human-environmental dynamics on a very broad range of topics, including climate and domestication in Southwest Asia (Contreras and Makarewicz; Jones et al.); pastoralist settlement and site organization in Mongolia (Wright); climate and settlement in California (Codding and Jones); land use in Mesoamerica (Borejsza and Joyce); the formation of anthropogenic soils in Amazonia (Browne Ribeiro); irrigation in coastal Peru (Caramanica and Koons) and the American Southwest (Purdue); and soil productivity and political power in Hawaii (Baer). The authors employ a wide array of methodologies grounded in intensive field and laboratory work, spatial analyses, and modeling. Though diverse, they share a concern with establishing stronger correlations as a first step towards identifying the causes of socionatural phenomena and transformations. In my closing comments, I briefly highlight two themes (temporal and spatial scales and resolution) that run through the chapters and Contreras’s thoughtful introduction; contemplate culture, politics, and agency; and consider the collective and collaborative work required to build robust arguments that explain complex interactions across the scales of time, space, and human experience.
A number of the authors emphasize the importance of studying and understanding socionatural processes at the scale of human perception and experience, which is more local and of a finer temporal resolution than some of the records used to reconstruct paleoenvironment or define archaeological time periods. Climate records from distant places may not be applicable; regional generalizations cannot capture local variability (Jones et al., Contreras and Makarewicz, Caramanica and Koons, Baer, this volume). Relations of possible causes and effects are obscured when only generalized observations across broad periods of time (e.g., from coarse artifact seriations) can be made (Borejsza and Joyce, this volume). And while archaeological studies of humans and the environment often highlight our ability to step back to look at long-term, large-scale processes (Codding and Jones, Borejsza and Joyce,
