Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology.

Miracle. Preston T.

Periodic reflection on the state of a field of study is a healthy exercise, particularly when done with a critical and discerning eye. Reitz, Newsom & Scudder have brought together 20 case studies by 31 authors not only to show 'that there are some things environmental archaeologists have learned about the human-environment relationship', but also to ask 'if we really know anything about human behaviour from environmental archaeology'. Potential readers can lay to rest fears of being faced by yet more reconstructions of vegetation history or diatribes about how best to count animal bones; in this volume the technical concerns that have dominated much of 'environmental archaeology' are for the most part set aside in favour of behavioural and cultural interpretations of 'environmental' data. The editors have in fact aimed their sights quite high as their overall goal is to show that environmental archaeology can contribute to general questions about the organization of human societies and cultures in the past.

The volume is dedicated to Elizabeth Wing, a pioneer in zooarchaeology and environmental archaeology. While not a festschrift per se, the geographic coverage (Western Hemisphere) and theoretical scope (palaeoenvironments, palaeo-nutrition, subsistence, social complexity) of these case-studies loosely reflect Wing's many interests as carried forward by her students and colleagues; and it is Wing's influence and legacy that gives some coherence to an otherwise eclectic collection of studies. Other threads common to the contributions are the importance of interdisciplinary studies, the formulation of explicit research designs and the generation of testable hypotheses. Patty Jo Watson, another pioneer in the field, stresses these points in her foreword in articulating her vision of a 'human science of environmental archaeology' that allows us to frame interesting and significant questions about human ecology as well as confidently to answer them.

In the leading chapter Reitz et al. define environmental archaeology in broad terms by identifying its practitioners. 'Environmental archaeologists apply information and techniques from the natural sciences to studies of the human past. . . .[For] studies of human behaviour should be set in an environmental framework that includes spatial, temporal, physical, and biotic parameters.' This definition is fairly straightforward and convenient, but suffers from a somewhat limited view of 'environment. This shortcoming is particularly apparent when they discuss how environmental techniques can shed light on the development of landscapes, which to them are more or less a concatenation of physical features. Missing from their discussion is the cultural construction and interpretation of landscapes, the 'cognized environments' that people create and within which they act (Rappaport 1984). Environmental archaeology thus draws on the earth sciences, zoology and botany; consideration of the case-studies would allow us to add nutritional science, and epidemiology to this list. Not surprisingly, environmental archaeologists are also a rather eclectic bunch. In the past they often had a background in one of the contributing natural sciences and applied their analytical techniques and interpretative talents to archaeological data and problems; regrettably their contributions were often buried in appendices to site reports with enticing titles such as 'the animal bones' or 'plant remains from . . .'. Today, environmental archaeologists are increasingly being taught in archaeology programmes by environmental archaeologists; the mainstreaming of yesterday's specialist is also reflected in the incorporation of environmental studies into the body of reports, and the growing trend of environmental archaeologists to design and conduct their own field projects. By its nature environmental archaeology is multidisciplinary. Reitz et al. note this with approval and divide environmental archaeology into four subfields - earth sciences, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology and bioarchaeology. Much of the rest of their chapter is devoted to further subdividing these subfields (e.g. earth sciences into geomorphology, sedimentology, archaeopedology and archaeometry) and outlining their contributions to environmental archaeology. While multidisciplinarity is certainly a strength, we should perhaps strive for truly interdisciplinary research. The organization of university training, the proliferation of increasingly specialized publications and the structure of research funding and academic rewards all encourage narrowly specialized environmental archaeologists and contribute to the further fragmentation of an already fragmented discipline. These trends must be resisted. The very existence of this volume and the interdisciplinary nature of many of the contributions (e.g. Marquardt, Scudder, Cooke et al., Larsen et of., de France et al.) are steps in the right direction.

Reitz et al. are unnecessarily defensive about the common, and too often valid, criticism that environmental archaeologists are specialists concerned primarily with methodological biases. In their response, they suggest that the techniques of environmental archaeology require special skills and knowledge, and that the degree to which one can explore questions is related to confidence in one's data. Both of these observations are applicable to the full range of archaeologies and archaeologists. There is more with which to take issue in their theoretical approach; the main theoretical issue that they raise is the direction of causality in the human-environment relationship. While they acknowledge that broader anthropological questions about topics like subsistence strategies involve an array of issues ranging from predator-prey relationships to belief systems, they do not provide any guidance for moving beyond the banality of everything being related to everything else.

In the following chapter Marquardt uses four new discoveries in southwestern Florida to illustrate many of Reitz et al.'s points. Marquardt's study is an excellent example of the importance of interdisciplinary research in bringing forward new questions and guiding methods, in this case the use of coastal resources as documented through the systematic use of fine-mesh sieves. His overarching interest is in the development of socio-political complexity among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, exemplified in southwestern Florida with the historically known Calusa. Marquardt shows that the year-round use of highly productive coastal resources, particularly fish, started 4000 years earlier than had been previously thought. These are nice examples of some fairly traditional contributions of zooarchaeology: the what, when and where of resource procurement, consumption and discard. The fourth discovery, based on the kinds of marine animals growing on humanly-collected oyster shells, enabled the study of changes in estuarine salinity and, by inference, sea-level fluctuations. Marquardt proudly notes that 'quantitative zooarchaeology is no longer just the science of what people ate for breakfast', and his research provides abundant evidence in support of this claim. Because of the high quality of this research and the significance of its results, I was disappointed not to see more discussion of the implications of these four new discoveries for our understanding of the evolution of social complexity during the Archaic Period in southwestern Florida. Marquardt is more successful in showing the significance of environmental archaeology to environmental education. His projects of local education and public outreach are exemplary and provide a model to be emulated by archaeologists everywhere.

The following six chapters are grouped under the heading 'The Physical Environment and Paleo-environments', but are much more diverse in content than this heading suggests. Stein, through a detailed geoarchaeological analysis of a shell midden on San Juan Island, Washington, demonstrates the importance of constructing separate stratigraphic units for each data-class, rather than relying on a soil change that may have nothing to do with changes in cultural activities. Scudder also looks at the geoarchaeology of shell middens, using sites in southwestern Florida, but from the perspective of isolating and identifying signatures of human impact. She compares soil chemistry to the preservation of bone and shell in middens, showing that human activities (oyster-shell disposal to form middens) can chemically seal underlying soils. Less convincing, although worth pursuing further, is her suggestion of using the rate of phosphorous accumulation, as a proxy for organic refuse disposal, to estimate the size of the past human population. Her more general point is that much of the most interesting information about middens and other archaeological features may lie in their composition rather than their contents; again, valuable data are passing through our sieves on to our back dirt. Two regional syntheses examine diachronic changes in human-environment relationships. King & King summarize geoarchaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data from the Pomme de Terre Valley in the western Missouri Ozarks. In a Panamanian case-study, Cooke, Norr & Piperno integrate results from studies of sediment cores (phytoliths, pollens, charcoal), stable isotopes in human bones and zooarchaeology to explore the complex relationships between population growth, landscape use and agricultural intensification. Unfortunately, they iron out many of the intriguing discrepancies between different lines of evidence (e.g. stable isotopes compared to zooarchaeology) to prevent a 'consensus' reconstruction of changes over time. While their interpretation of a long period of experimentation with agriculture (including maize) prior to it becoming economically important may well be correct, they present little evidence in support of their position, and they brush aside rather than confront some of the recent criticisms of identifying the use of domestic crops from plant microfossils. More convincing is their demonstration that already during Paleo-Indian times hunter-gatherers were having a significant impact on the landscape. The impact of hunter-gatherers on landscapes is nicely illustrated by a single ethnographic case-study: Fowler's discussion of Timbisha Shoshone land management practices during the recent past in Death Valley National Monument. The Timbisha Shoshone used controlled burns, underbrush clearance, pinyon pine and mesquite pruning, and willow coppicing to increase the productivity and availability of food resources, raw materials and suitable camp sites. Fowler's study reinforces the well-known point that there is no such thing as a 'natural' or unmodified landscape - wherever studied, hunter-gatherers have been shown to be skilled resource managers (Williams & Hunn 1982). The final case-study in this section, Sandweiss' 'malacoarchaeological' perspective on the economic choices of prehistoric coastal and inland foragers in Peru, could just have easily been included under the heading 'Subsistence Strategies'. Sandweiss summarizes several studies to illustrate the range of variables that condition people's decision to include shellfish in their diet. Interestingly, Paleo-Indians appear to have started to use shellfish as soon as they descended to the coast, calling into question suggestions that foragers would have turned to shellfish only as a last choice.

Two papers explicitly address issues of nutrition and health, although both topics are implicated in other studies of subsistence and palaeoenvironments. Larsen et al. use a battery of bioarchaeological techniques (cross-section geometry of long-bone shafts, dental hypoplasias, osteo-arthritis, stable isotope chemistry) to show that prehistoric foragers in the Great Basin were overall physically robust and fairly healthy, with little difference between the sexes in dietary composition, but much greater mobility of males than females. From these results they suggest that populations remained highly mobile and used a variety of upland and lowland environments, despite the rich and diverse lowland marsh resources that could have supported a human population year-round. Their goal is to move beyond the dichotomy of Hobbesian hardship versus 'original affluence' characterizations of hunter-gatherers in general, to look at variability among foragers in workload, diet, health, mobility and so on. Reinhard looks at human coprolites from two prehistoric Anasazi villages to reconstruct the parasite ecology. He suggests that regular differences in parasite load between these populations were caused by subtle contrasts in resource exploitation (regularity of use of wetlands and exposure to parasites) and hygiene (well-defined and isolated versus haphazardly scattered latrines) rather than differences in population size or residential mobility. The importance of these two studies comes from their use of nutrition and health to evaluate the quality and success of strategies. This presents us with the opportunity of breaking the Panglossian fetters of assuming that past strategies, by their archaeological visibility, must have been 'adaptive'. Effort can instead be invested in identifying and explaining variability, the raw material for selection and evolutionary change.

Seven case-studies are presented under the rubric 'Subsistence Strategies', although as should by now be clear, most studies deal with subsistence-related issues in one guise or another. Sobolik examines zooarchaeological, macrobotanical and coprolite evidence from the northern Chihuahuan Desert and shows that people positioned themselves on the landscape to take advantage of seasonally available resources. Russo & Quitmyer also examine the relationship between subsistence and residential mobility, suggesting very early coastal sedentism in southwestern Florida. In contrast to Sobolik, who looked at assemblage composition, their arguments hinge on detailed analyses of shell growth. Pearsall tackles the problem of subsistence in tropical lowland South America (Ecuador). She compares evidence from phytoliths and macrobotanical remains from on- and off-site contexts. Like Cooke et al., she suggests that maize played only a minor role in subsistence strategies for a long time (over 2000 years) after it was first cultivated. Pearsall shows that the intensification of food production in lowland Ecuador is correlated with local volcanic eruptions, and the opportunities and stresses for agriculturists created by such natural 'disasters'. Wagner looks at subsistence practices among Fort Ancient communities of the Ohio Valley and suggests that access to hunted meat and food storage remained crucial to patterns of residential mobility among 'sedentary' farmers. Whereas Pearsall focused on the effects of unpredictable shortages, Wagner shows that Fort Ancient peoples effectively combined food storage and residential mobility to buffer against a predictable food shortage during the winter. Neusius develops zooarchaeological methods for identifying garden-hunting, and suggests that garden-hunting was used to overcome scheduling demands between crop cultivation and hunting. Her analyses stumble, however, on several unwarranted assumptions - e.g. that horticulturists would adopt a more generalized hunting strategy in response to time-stress, and that they would exploit a resource in proportion to its biomass. Input from foraging theory would strengthen Neusius' model. De France et al. look at the impact of human colonization on island ecosystems in the Caribbean. At the local scale, the immigrants adopted the local flora and fauna to South American concepts of home gardens and arboriculture, while at the island scale there is no evidence of large-scale land clearance or decline in indigenous faunas following human colonization. Not surprisingly, the answer to the question of human impact on the environment depends on one's analytical scale. Byrd compares the faunal inventories from coastal and inland Peruvian sites and shows that makers of the same archaeological culture used different methods to obtain their dietary protein.

The final two cas- studies explicitly examine the effects of 'social' factors on subsistence strategies. Zeder & Arter present a detailed zooarchaeological analysis of white-tailed deer bones from a late pre-historic (Mississippian) village site in Missouri. They find it much easier to eliminate interpretations or variables than definitively to account for the robust patterns in bone representation, fragmentation and movement that they find within the Snodgrass Site. At Fort Michilimac, Michigan, Scott looks at food as a marker of socio-economic status and ethnic affiliation. By using written records from the 18th century, she develops a model of how socio-economic status might cross-cut ethnic affiliation in food consumption and suggests ways of testing her model with zooarchaeological data. While trends in her data support her model, the patterns are not very strong, and she concludes that factors such as the local availability and abundance of resources have a much greater influence on food consumption than social status or ethnicity. It is discouraging when high-resolution, well-documented zooarchaeological assemblages remain relatively intractable to answering 'social' questions. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the sophistication of these analyses and hope that others will follow their lead.

Kathleen Deegan closes the volume by outlining and promoting 'environmental historical archaeology'. The often high resolution and richness of the archaeological record from historical periods makes environmental historical archaeology an especially appropriate arena for integrating social and cultural factors into studies of the environment and subsistence. Not unexpectedly, Deegan is the only contributor explicitly to discuss the potential contribution of post-processualist approaches, by for example looking at how individuals manipulated social and natural environments or by examining consumer choice. She reviews a number of case-studies, focusing in particular on the divergence of foodways in colonial America among Europeans, African-Americans and Native Americans. For a volume otherwise long on data and short on theory, Deegan's explicit concerns with archaeological theory and her perceptive discussion of environmental studies in historical archaeology are a breath of fresh air.

For the last 25 years, taphonomy and methodology have been the watchwords of those archaeologists engaged in the collection and interpretation of 'environmental' data. Few archaeologists, regardless of the theoretical fashion they favour to clothe their data, object to improving methods of data generation, analysis and presentation. We constantly run the risk, however, of losing sight of broader interpretative and explanatory goals for the sake of further refinement of methods. When will we get some interpretational 'interest' from our taphonomic 'investments'? Within environmental archaeology there is also the temptation, or danger, depending on how you look at it, of pursuing questions and agendas set by the contributing natural science rather than the anthropological issues that may originally have inspired the research. Environmental archaeologists are thus pulled in different directions - those of methodology and interpretation; but these do not need to be in opposition to one another.

This volume is a timely attempt to address these concerns about the relationships between archaeological method and theory. However, with just a few notable exceptions, and despite the editors' best intentions, many of these case-studies remain heavily methodological and data-driven. Without delving into the particulars of how a given method works, many authors document the range and type of data that can be produced, while presenting only a superficial discussion of behavioural or cultural interpretations of their data. Unfortunately, this may limit the appeal of the book as a stand-alone textbook on environmental archaeology. On the other hand, one of the strengths of this book is that case-studies from throughout the field are collected under a signal cover. Some of the more interesting contributions are those in which data from different environmental subdisciplines are compared and contrasted (Marquardt, Scudder, Cooke et al., Larsen et al., de France et al.), and there is good potential for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Thus, as a companion volume, Case studies in environmental archaeology should work quite well in archaeological courses that take an environmental slant.

Has environmental archaeology come to fruition? From a methodological standpoint it most certainly has; if anything it is over-ripe. In terms of archaeological theory, however, it is a late bloomer. Most of the contributors use an ecosystemic approach to the interpretation and explanation of past human activities. From the standpoint of archaeological theory, many of the contributions are retro 1970s-80s, with a focus on the group-level adaptive significance of subsistence strategies and other cultural practices. In many quarters, environmental archaeology has developed the reputation of being a theoretical backwater, a 'living fossil' brushed aside by the post-modern and neo-Darwinian radiations across the academic landscape. Many of the contributions to this volume perpetuate, implicitly if not explicitly, the well-worn opposition between human cultures and the 'natural' environment. While we have started paying lip-service to the idea that people culturally construct and appropriate 'nature' (Ingold 1986), there are as yet relatively few archaeological applications (see Allen & O'Connell 1995). With the exception of de France et al., none of the case-studies use the interpretively richer and more inclusive sense of 'landscape' as a cultural construct. This is another opportunity lost, for the interpretation of archaeological landscapes is fertile ground for the integration of so-called processual and post-processual approaches (e.g. Gosden 1994; Tilley 1994). Nonetheless, this volume contains much material for further theoretical reflection, discussion and construction.

References

ALLEN, J. & J. O'CONNELL (ed.). 1995. Transitions, Antiquity 69: 649-862. Special number 265.

GOSDEN, C. 1994. Time, social life, and being. Oxford: Blackwell.

INGOLD, T. 1986. The appropriation of nature. Iowa City (IA): University of Iowa Press.

RAPPOPORT, R.A. 1984. Pigs for the ancestors. 2nd edition. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.

TILLEY, C. 1994. A phenomenology of landscape. Oxford: Blackwell.

WILLIAMS, N.M. & E.S. HUNN (ed.). 1982. Resource managers: North American and Australian hunter-gatherers. Boulder (CO): Westview Press. American Association for the Advancement of Science Selected Symposium 67.