2 - Reassessing the “Land” of Landscape

Summary

This chapter provides a review of archaeologies of landscape and outlines where environmental studies reside within these discussions, particularly in the recent rise of climatic and environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean. Through a review of the challenges of environmental determinism and the interpretive problems of studies of the historical forcing of climatic events in human history, Kearns argues for integrated methodologies that look critically at varied scales of evidence and interpretation. In advocating the study of weathered materials and their instrumentality within ancient landscape studies, the chapter engages with recent archaeological scholarship on materialism that analyzes how things act and effect historical change. Kearns contends that differentiated entanglements of communities and their physical, changing surroundings contributed to transformations in social and political evaluations of land, place, and status.