Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology
Geoarchaeology and environmental archaeology apply the earth and biological sciences to reconstruct past landscapes, climates, and ecosystems and to understand how sites formed and how people interacted with their environments.
Definition
The combined fields that use earth-science and bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct past environments and site-formation histories and to analyze human-environment relationships in the archaeological record.
Scope
This area covers the study of sediments, soils, and landforms in archaeological contexts, the formation and transformation of the archaeological record, and the recovery and interpretation of biological remains such as plants, animals, pollen, and microfossils. It links archaeology to geomorphology, pedology, palaeoecology, and palaeoclimatology to set human activity within its environmental setting.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How did archaeological deposits form and become altered over time?
- What were the climates, landscapes, and ecosystems of the past?
- What did people eat, herd, and cultivate, and how did they shape their environment?
- How are biological and sedimentary remains recovered and interpreted?
Key theories
- Site-formation processes
- Schiffer's framework distinguishing cultural and natural processes that create and transform the archaeological record, essential to interpreting any deposit before drawing behavioral conclusions.
- Earth-science approach to context
- The view that sediments, soils, and landforms are themselves archaeological evidence, so geomorphological and pedological analysis is needed to understand sites and landscapes.
History
Geoarchaeology grew from the application of Quaternary geology and geomorphology to sites, formalized by Karl Butzer's contextual archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s. Environmental archaeology developed alongside as the systematic recovery of plant and animal remains, aided by flotation and sieving, while Michael Schiffer's work on formation processes reshaped how all archaeological deposits are interpreted.
Debates
- Cultural versus natural formation processes
- A central debate concerns disentangling human behavior from natural agencies in the formation of deposits, and how far observed patterns reflect past activity rather than post-depositional change.
Key figures
- Michael B. Schiffer
- Paul Goldberg
- Karl Butzer
- John G. Evans
Related topics
Seminal works
- schiffer1987
- rapphill2006
- goldbergmacphail2006
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between geoarchaeology and environmental archaeology?
- Geoarchaeology focuses on sediments, soils, and landforms using earth-science methods, while environmental archaeology focuses on biological remains such as plants and animals; in practice the two overlap closely in reconstructing past environments.
- Why study site-formation processes?
- Because both human actions and natural forces create and disturb deposits, understanding formation processes is necessary to avoid mistaking natural patterns for past human behavior.