Editor’s introduction

Abstract

Historical ecology as a specialization within archaeology, cultural anthropology, and related fields, has been in a process of re-articulating and extending a set of concerns with deep roots in North American and especially Americanist anthropology. The classic cultural ecology of the 1950s and 1960s assumed a feedback relationship between human groups and the environment at the landscape level and beyond. Going further back, this links with the original purpose of Franz Boas’s fieldwork on Baffin Island: to examine the myriad ways in which the environment shaped culture, and in which humans perceived, utilized, and altered the environment. The resurgence of ecological concerns in the 1990s and 2000s led by anthropologists such as William Balée and Carole Crumley was timely, coming on the heels of the “spatial turn” in cultural anthropology in the early 1990s and coinciding with awareness of global warming and what would come to be called the Anthropocene. One can only imagine how archaeologists of the future (assuming they exist!) will read the historical ecology of our era, but certainly present-day archaeologists are contributing greatly to our understanding of the historical ecology of many world regions, none more so than Amazonia. Christian Isendahl discusses several volumes of work in historical ecology of the past decade, and traces development of certain themes such as sustainability, around which, Isendahl argues, the field has coalesced. It is of historical interest to note that this set of books, the most recent of which was published in 2013, makes no mention of the Anthropocene, which was to become the central concept in American anthropology at the 2014 American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC.