Soils, landscapes, and cultural concepts of favor and disfavor within complex adaptive systems and ResourceCultures: human-land interactions during the Holocene

Abstract

We review and contrast three frameworks for analyzing human-land interactions in the Holocene: the traditional concept of favored and disfavored landscapes, the new concept of ResourceCultures from researchers at University of Tübingen, and complex adaptive systems, which is a well-established contemporary approach in interdisciplinary research. Following a theoretical integration of fundamental concepts, we analyze three paired case studies involving modern agriculture in Germany and Belize, prehistorical changes in land use in southwest Germany, and aquaculture on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America. We conclude that ResourceCultures and complex adaptive systems provide different but complementary strengths, but that both move beyond the favordisfavor concept for providing a holistic, system-level approach to understanding human-land interactions. The three frameworks for understanding human responses to contemporary cultural and biophysical challenges are relevant to new thinking related to sustainability, resilience, and long-term environmental planning in the Anthropocene.

A subaqueous soil‐landscape conceptual model to guide soil survey in Chesapeake Bay subestuaries

“…These models and surveys explain the distribution of soils and their properties across these landscapes, enabling the development of land-use interpretations that match the suitability of different soils to the plethora of restoration, conservation, production (i.e., aquaculture), and other activities that take place in the coastal zone. If pedologists can communicate the value of these soil surveys and encourage their use for sustainable natural resource management, they will play a key role in rethinking the way our civilization utilizes coastal and submerged environments (James et al, 2021), as productive resources to be actively managed rather than primarily extractive resources to be passively managed. In Rhode River, areas of the river bottom are already being leased by individuals and businesses through the State of Maryland for shellfish aquaculture.…”

Why do we need interdisciplinary cooperation with anthropologists and archaeologists in soil science?

“…This certainly broadens the spectrum of the significance of soils for humans, but their appreciation by a wide range of the world's population is still low (e.g., Lal et al 2007) and the valuation of soils is still primarily linked to technical aspects. Holistic approaches like the ResourceComplex approach can help to overcome not only old cultural concepts of favor and disfavor for analyzing human-land interactions (James et al, 2021), but also to understand why certain actions are not effective or are not applied. For example, from a soil scientific point of view sensible countermeasures, for instance to conserve soil health or prevent loss of biodiversity, are often not applied, even though they would prevent loss of soil health.…”

“…With this analytical tool, one can identify all elements and connections that affect the use of a specific resource and also visualize the feedbacks between these elements. Such an approach can for example disentangle human–land interactions and cultural concepts during the Holocene (James et al., 2021). Like the theories and concepts of Gudeman (2001), Latour (1999, 2011), Ingold (2016) and Hodder (2012) explain, networks, meshworks, or entanglements exist between resources and other elements that enable the use of the resource itself.…”

“…Also, today's knowledge can be used for the interpretation of colluvial deposits and archaeological finds and applied to observations of land use in earlier societies and other cultures (James et al., 2021; Pietsch & Kühn, 2017; Scherer, Höpfer et al., 2021; Teuber et al., 2017). In a larger context, such ResourceComplexes can then be understood as ResourceCultures (see Hardenberg et al.…”

“…[2017] for a theoretical discourse about this concept and James et al. [2021] for a comparison of ResourceCultures with other concepts applied to human–land interactions during the Holocene). However, this might be misleading from a soil science perspective alone, when not considering recent advances in sociology or anthropology concerning knowledge orders, such as those also present in the perspective of the SFB 1070 ResourceCultures and which become apparent in human practices and in material culture.…”