Multidisciplinary studies in environmental archaeology with particular reference to China: An introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

An important focus in research over the past decade is the relationship between climatic/environmental change and human cultural evolution during the Holocene. This decade saw an increasing number of natural scientists involved in this research, which led to debates and collaborations between natural scientists and archaeologists/anthropologists. This decade also witnessed an increase in multidisciplinary research across these subjects, which has improved significantly the understanding of the human-environment relationship. As part of this research drive, this Special Issue highlights the importance of multidisciplinary studies, mainly from China, on early rice agriculture, impacts of environmental change in Neolithic communities, and new approaches for environmental reconstruction.

How Can We Understand the Past from Now On? Three-Dimensional Modelling and Landscape Reconstruction of the Shuanghuaishu Site in the Central Plains of China

“…Buried sites that lack aboveground marks, where details such as texture and structure are not visible, are more dependent on archaeological results and expert knowledge to identify analogies and provide speculations that aid restoration [51][52][53]. Environmental archaeology is an interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeology and paleogeography, which have growing theoretical and technical maturity, to analyse paleoenvironmental and human-environmental interactions [54][55][56][57][58][59]; the results obtained through this approach can provide important theoretical and data support for landscape recovery at sites.…”