Читать книгу Mesoamerican Archaeology - Группа авторов - Страница 34

Archaeologists have long been interested in the relationship between human societies and their environment, particularly through the theoretical perspective of cultural ecology (Steward 1955) especially influential in Mesoamerica (e.g., Coe and Flannery 1967; Flannery 1968; MacNeish 1964; Sanders and Price 1968), so they launched a series of major settlement pattern studies (e.g., Blanton et al. 1982; Flannery and Marcus 1983; Kowalewski et al. 1989; MacNeish et al. 1972; Sanders et al. 1979; Willey et al. 1965). These important studies nevertheless tended to conceptualize the environment either as a passive backdrop against which humans acted or as a set of determinants to which humans adapted (Knapp and Ashmore 1999: 2).

Since the 1990s, archaeologists have increasingly turned to the concept of landscape, which incorporates but extends beyond the long-standing interest in the environment, as a useful way to address questions about how individuals and collectives mobilized ideological, social, and economic sources of power toward political ends (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Crumley 1994; Daniels and Cosgrove 1988; Ingold 1993; Smith 2003; Tilley 1994; see also Earle 1997). For example, the more recent research program of historical ecology emphasizes the mutual interactions of the natural environment and humans as integral components of the world’s ecosystems (Baleé 2006). In this conception landscapes are “the material manifestation of the relationship between humans and the environment” (Crumley 1994: 6) over the long term. Drawing on insights from geography, cultural anthropology, and philosophy (e.g., de Certeau 1984; Heidegger 1972; Hirsch 1995; Lefebvre 1991; Merleu-Ponty 1968; Tsing 2001; Tuan 1974), the intersecting field of landscape archaeology further emphasizes the role of human perception in creating meaningful places within landscapes as well as that of landscapes in shaping human experience in a mutually constitutive relationship (e.g., Knapp and Ashmore 1999; Ingold 1993; Thomas 2012: 75; Tilley 1994). The influence of this line of thought can be seen in Olmec studies, where the settings and juxtapositions in the natural and built landscape has taken an increasingly prominent place in the interpretation of their social and ideological meanings and uses over the last three decades (e.g., Cyphers 1999, 2004; Grove 1999, 2000; Pool and Loughlin 2017; Tate 1999). Critical to the creation of meaning in landscapes is the forging of shared social memory through telling stories, enacting performances, and emplacing material signs that evoke those memories (Mixter and Henry 2017; Rowlands 1993; Van Dyke and Alcock 2008). The establishment of social memory tied to place is strongly involved in forming ethnic and political identities the latter particularly as associated with territory. In a related vein, Adam T. Smith (2003) has argued convincingly that the creation of a political landscape played a key role in creating and maintaining authority in early complex polities.

Thus, in expressing the relationships between humans and the environment materially, as Crumley succinctly states, landscapes combine perceptual and conceptual aspects with the material. Furthermore, the material forms and distributions of human and nonhuman components of landscapes express multiple and intersecting sets of relationships, or dimensions. Different authors partition these dimensions differently as, for example, constructed, conceptualized, and ideational (Knapp and Ashmore 1999: 10–13) or experienced, perceived, and imagined (Smith 2003). Some, focusing on particular kinds of relationships between human institutions and the physical environment, describe social, economic, political, and ritual (or sacred) landscapes (e.g., Stoner and Pool 2015), while others focus on the different scales of interaction with reference to a particular aspect of human practice or organization, as in Smith’s (2003) geopolitical landscapes among polities, territorial landscapes within polities, settlement-centered landscapes reflecting regimes, and the architectural landscapes of institutions.

These are all valuable lenses through which to view landscapes. The important things to keep in mind are that (1) all these dimensions and kinds of relationships exist simultaneously and dynamically, mutually influencing the changing form of landscapes through time, and (2) particular spheres of human endeavor do not always coincide over the landscape but may be disjointed over space and time. In organizing discussion in this essay, I distinguish physical (encompassing geological, biological, and climatic aspects), economic, social, and symbolic components of landscapes that relate most closely to particular data sets and institutions, while recognizing that these are intertwined in complex and varied ways with one another.