Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology

Abstract

The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage—all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. Archaeology can make a substantial contribution here. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the resilience concept in archaeology. Despite its ever-increasing relevance, resilience is still frequently understood within the framework of positivist approaches and branches of systems thinking that cannot capture our unfolding predicament and pay too little attention to the embodied historical asymmetries between more-than-human social worlds. This review identifies the potential for reformulations of resilience theory and its attendant concepts within a less positivistic and human-centered conceptual register. New translations of resilience in archaeology pave the way for more nuanced approaches to concepts of history and their sociopolitical use, as well as alternative time dynamics of historical change. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 51 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Mapping the ecological resilience of Atlantic postglacial heathlands

“…Not only is heathland resilience crucially dependent on the historical, social and environmental context, including previous land‐use patterns, but a long‐term scale is also necessary to capture its longer term entrapment in cycles of disturbance and rejuvenation. In this way, instead of leaving humans out of the equation, we support a multispecies, multidirectional understanding of resilience (Costanza et al, 2007 ), given that human disturbances can have a positive, even crucial impact on ecosystem stability (Løvschal, 2022 ). However, to be able to assess humans' role in increasing/decreasing heathland resilience, both in the past and with respect to future management, we suggest to focus on factors indicative ecological resilience in the following analytical approach.…”

“…The data underlying our results in Figure 4 have been made available in the Supporting Information file via the Dryad Digital Depository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxpxr (Løvschal & Damgaard, 2022 ).…”

“…Atlantic Northern Europe, Calluna vulgaris, conservation, heathland, historical management practices, resilience affordances, succession, tree encroachment disturbances can have a positive, even crucial impact on ecosystem stability (Løvschal, 2022). However, to be able to assess humans' role in increasing/decreasing heathland resilience, both in the past and with respect to future management, we suggest to focus on factors indicative ecological resilience in the following analytical approach.…”

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

“…In archaeology, the lion's share of such attempts not only place undue stress on available chronological controls, but they also sidestep the growing recognition that how people respond to environmental perturbations is in large part a consequence of organizational effectiveness both prior to and during challenges (e.g., Middleton, 2017;Molloy, 2022). Our focus on sustainability recognizes that perturbations may be environmental, economic, or sociopolitical, and that most frequently these stresses are synergistically intertwined (Fisher and Feinman, 2005;Løvschal, 2022;Silva et al, 2022). Furthermore, the effectiveness of responses to climatic and other perturbations is to a large degree underpinned by the nature and quality of governance (e.g., Adger, 2003;Pildes, 2021;Jones et al, 2022).…”

Great Basin Survivance (USA): Challenges and Windfalls of the Neoglaciation / Late Holocene Dry Period (3100–1800 cal BP)

“…Despite the obvious appeals of “collapse archaeology” (Butzer and Endfield 2012), many have become impatient with simplistic tales of past societies overexploiting and overshooting the limitations of their ecosystems, leading to internal and external stresses followed by transformation or outright collapse (Løvschal 2022:197; McAnany and Yoffee 2010; Olsson et al 2015). Hypotheses directly connecting social “collapses” to abrupt climate change suffer from broadly dated paleoclimatic proxies with uncertain effects on society: such disconnects make it difficult to define causal linkages between human societies and the “megadisturbances” they experience (Kohler and Rockman 2020; Millar and Stephenson 2015).…”