ANTH4069

This seminar course discusses current approaches to historical ecology, the study of human-environmental relationships over time. The course draws on and combines perspectives from the four subdisciplines of anthropology (archaeological anthropology, bioarchaeological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology), and similar disciplines, to understand the varying ways that scholars have analyzed and defined ecologies and environmental problems. It places particular emphasis on theories that define human relationships to the environment as recursive and interdependent. These theories stand in contrast to common Western theological suppositions that see the environment as a framework to which human societies adapt or a set of resources for human communities to exploit. Rather, historical ecologists argue that the environment is a true ecology with humans in it. They contend that human communities are fundamentally and inextricably intertwined with the life cycles and needs of other species, and consequently they study how human-environmental interactions emerge through distinct historical processes and cultural circumstances.