The Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes

The Archaeology of Adaptation

Marcy Rockman, James Steele, Marcy Rockman, James Steele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415256063
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134520138
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This innovative and important volume presents the archaeological and anthropological foundations of the landscape learning process. Contributions apply the related fields of ethnography, cognitive psychology, and historical archaeology to the issues of individual exploration, development of trail systems, folk knowledge, social identity, and the role of the frontier in the growth of the modern world.

A series of case studies examines the archaeological evidence for and interpretations of landscape learning from the movement of the first pre-modern humans into Europe, peoplings of the Old and New World at the end of the Ice Age, and colonization of the Pacific, to the English colonists at Jamestown.

The final chapters summarize the implications of the landscape learning idea for our understanding of human history and set out a framework for future research.

Part I
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

1
KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF COLONIZATION

Marcy Rockman

What does it mean to know an environment? In today’s terms, what do we know about the spaces in which we live – about their resources, their unique characteristics, their limitations? How long did it take for us to learn them? How much of what we know comes from personal experience and how much is drawn from the experiences of others? When we leave an environment, what information do we take with us, and how and for how long do we apply that information in the new environments to which we go? And, from a material perspective, do the things we leave behind represent what we knew of our environments during our time in them?

The inspiration for asking these questions in this paper was a discussion by Bruce Trigger of V. Gordon Childe’s work on the topic of knowledge and the environment. Childe, Trigger states, described knowledge as a “set of shared mental approximations of the real world that [permit] human beings to act upon it” Childe also noted that “human beings adapt not to their real environment but to their ideas about it, even if effective adaptation requires a reasonably close correspondence between reality and how it is perceived” (Trigger 1989: 261). This idea of effective adaptation is key. It underlines the question of what knowledge is absolutely necessary for people to exist and persist in an environment, and how knowledge about an environment accumulates and comes to reflect experiences in the environment over time.

The topics of adaptation and the development of human–environment interactions are therefore deeply linked to the archaeological study of colonization. Clive Gamble, in his work Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization (1993: 182), notes that “the changes in behavior required to complete this process [of global colonization] are what made us human, even though that behavior had no such goal in mind. We were not adapted for filling up the world. It was instead a consequence of changes in behavior, an exaptive radiation produced by the cooption of existing elements into a new framework for action.” Thus, it was changes in behavior that brought the human form into contact with new environments and, in turn, new environments that further enforced and encouraged the development of new behaviors. As such, there is a need for archaeology to consider deeply how it studies, understands, and interrelates the topics of colonization, behavior, and environmental knowledge.

Further, an archaeological response to the opening questions of this paper requires not only assessment of artifacts made and used in past environments and assessment of what effective adaptations to them might entail, but also a consideration of how humans shared information about those environments and how long it took for that shared information to generate an appropriate balance between perception and reality.

Over the years, archaeologists have constructed several models to describe past colonizations. Knowledge of and learning an environment are implicit in these models, but have not yet been examined as primary factors. I think they should be. The choice of whether or not to consider the issue of environmental knowledge when constructing or applying a movement model is itself based on assumptions of how environmental knowledge develops and functions in the interactions between people and the places they lived in and how environmental knowledge may have affected the traces of the people we study. The task taken here is a critical examination of these assumptions and a consideration of the questions above in terms of human colonization and adaptation. It is not yet clear whether the theoretical and methodological tools of archaeology are fine enough to complete the task. The purpose of this paper is to show that the topics of knowledge and learning are already so integral to our conceptions of how people come to be in places and how they live there once they arrive that it is important to make the attempt. This chapter discusses what is meant by knowledge of the environment and how such knowledge currently exists in our models of human movement, and gives suggestions on how the topic of knowledge and learning can address important questions relating to both the past and the present.

Environmental knowledge

Knowing the environment can mean many things. For the sake of clarity, I suggest three basic types of information:

• Locational Locations and physical characteristics of necessary resources (e.g. the size of the lithic source outcrop)
• Limitational Boundaries and costs of necessary resources (e.g. the harvesting potential of ripe vegetation, extremity of seasonal variation)
• Social Attribution of names, meanings, and patterns to natural features; transformation of environment into a human landscape (see Basso 1996; Rossignol and Wandsnider 1992) (e.g. attribution of experiences to specific local landscape features).

Locational knowledge includes information relating to the spatial and physical characteristics of particular resources. For example, it includes the extent of a given plant community, the valley in which there is a particular lithic source, the topography of faunal migration routes. It also includes the ability to relocate such resources after their discovery. Locational knowledge is considered to be the easiest form of information to acquire. As Golledge (Chapter 2) shows, modern locational knowledge may be gathered rapidly, in the space of days, weeks, or months. Research by Brody (1981) among the Native Americans of the Dog River Reserve in British Columbia also suggests that hunter-gatherers are and were very acute to locational information and could gather large amounts in a similarly short timeframe.

This category should not be taken to suggest that all resources of a given area are identified instantaneously. In order for a resource to be located and relocated, it must be considered within the technology and economy of the identifying group. A number of historical situations are known in which the potential of particular resources was not recognized until a significant period after initial occupation of the region. For example, it took nearly 40 years for gold miners in Nevada to recognize gold deposits that varied from the “traditional” forms known from the Comstock Lode (Hardesty, Chapter 5; see also Rockman 2001, concerning a similar case in Wyoming). Some resources may be noted but may lie outside the technology of the group and its economy. Van Andel and Runnels (1995) note that Mesolithic populations of Greece do not seem to have used the upland plains, although these areas were later occupied by early Neolithic settlers.

Limitational knowledge refers to familiarity with the usefulness and reliability of various resources, including the combination of multiple resources into a working environment. For example, what are the seasonal variations in biotic resources? How workable and reliable are the lithic materials for the variety of stone tool tasks? How fertile is the soil for agriculture? How extensively can plants be harvested; how many people can be supported in the area? What is the range of game that inhabits the area, and how stable are those populations? Development of limitational knowledge depends upon the periodicity of the given resource and its intended use. For general purposes, I suggest that it most likely takes at least a generation to develop familiarity with resources: their fluctuations, their potentials, and their carrying capacity on a scale that influences human activity. For example, in their study of demic expansion of early Neolithic settlements in central Greece, van Andel and Runnels (1995) cite the output flow of the Pineios River in the Larisa basin of Thessaly. The main discharge of the river takes place over the winter months, with a total flow of 3,000 × 10⁶ cubic meters. Measurements taken over a period of 35 years show that the annual variation in output is approximately one-fourth of the average annual flow. These measurements do not indicate whether even greater variations might be noted over a longer period of observation; nor do figures taken in the middle of the twentieth century necessarily represent the range of variation during the early Neolithic. What it does show is that it may have taken up to 35 years or more to develop a baseline familiarity with river behavior and the frequency and full extent of its flooding potential. Other periodicities, such as drought and temperature variation, would also affect full growing potential in the basin. The interplay among these variations may extend the time period needed for familiarization with them, or they may ultimately be beyond the range of human planning. (For full discussion of temporal dynamics and environmental process rates, see Dean 1988; Hopkinson 2001; Rockman 2002.)

Social knowledge is the collection of social experiences that serves as a means of transforming the environment or a collection of natural resources into a human landscape. There is currently an abundant literature on the archaeology of landscapes (see Rossignol and Wandsnider 1992; Ucko and Layton 1999) and a range of specific definitions. It is not the objective of this chapter to propose a new definition, but to emphasize the key theme of many of the definitions that landscapes are spaces in which a group of humans actively interact with a natural environment. In this sense, landscapes include natural topographic features, a range of built or modified features, and socially determined patterns of activity within and amongst these features (after C. Tolan-Smith 1998: 1). These patterns of activity are of particular interest here in the context of the knowledge and perceptions that inform them and the processes of their development and change through time.

Analyses of the oral traditions of native coastal and inland groups of northern Alaska by Minc (1986) and Minc and Smith (1989) provide a basis for characterizing social knowledge of landscapes and estimating the timeframes necessary for developing the information to a usable level. This work suggests that a group’s stories and folklore encode mechanisms for coping with the different scales of environmental variation in the region. Different types of stories include different types of information and prescribe different types of mechanisms. The most extreme mechanism is that of abandonment. When abandonment is prescribed by ritual stories, it is under circumstances that environmental periodicities may produce in the order of once every several hundred years. Thus, more than one such cycle is necessary (e.g. up to twice the period of several hundred years) to develop the mythical structure of adaptation. For example, oral traditions of the Tareumiut and Nunamiut encode oscillations between environmental conditions that alternately favor marine or terrestrial fauna in the movement of animal spirits. One storyline notes that

[w]hen wolves starve on land they go to their relatives in the sea and turn into killer whales; conversely, killer whales, when unable to find food in the sea, travel inland and become wolves. Similarly, mountain sheep are thought to wander down to the sea and become beluga. Thus, it is known that when there are plenty of beluga off the Arctic coast, mountain sheep will be scarce and when sheep are plentiful in the Brooks Range, beluga are absent in the adjacent coastal regions.

(Minc and Smith 1989: 20)

In this way, myth and ritual provide an explicit example for human responses to failure of resources or famine: in the way that fauna take alternative forms and move between resource zones in times of need, human groups should also migrate and adopt alternative subsistence strategies when local resources fail. As these coping mechanisms for resource stress are founded on the behavior of animals during climatic cycles, it can be suggested that it should take as long as at least one full cycle to create such mechanisms. Paleoenvironmental data collected by Minc and Smith indicate that the temporal length of each fluctuation is 60–100 years, thus a full oscillation requires at least 120–200 years (1989: 17).

Such mechanisms/tales linking environmental information and social practice can be integral to a group’s sense of place and to the creation of a cultural landscape. This is important for the archaeology of knowledge and colonization: the longer and more closely tied a group is to a particular bounded environment, the more likely it is that the various ways in which the group members consider it “their” landscape will affect the ways in which they use that landscape and, ultimately, the archaeological traces of that use. For example, Keith Basso, in his account of the language of the Western Apache of the US Southwest, eloquently describes the importance of topography in Apache relationships with the landscape and how children learn Apache lifeways. Apache children are regularly invited to travel, especially with people who will tell them about the places they see and visit. This mode of education, Basso says,

rests on the premise that knowledge is useful to the extent that it can be swiftly recalled and turned without effort to practical ends. A related premise is that objects whose appearance is unique are more easily recalled than those that look alike. It follows from these assumptions that because places are visually unique (a fact marked and affirmed by their possession of separate names) they serve as excellent vehicles for recalling useful knowledge.

(Basso 1996: 134; emphasis added)

This “useful knowledge” is the sets of stories and tales about past events and experiences of Apache ancestors. These stories are fable-like and embody lessons on views of life and on ways of interacting with family and others and with local resources. Many of the stories are so well known that the morals they encode can be invoked simply by stating the name of the place where the events described took place. The names themselves are in turn highly descriptive of the landscape and thereby firmly tie lifeways of the Western Apache to the surrounding environment, giving both a sense of history and of long-term occupancy.

Relationship between environmental knowledge and colonization

These three types of knowledge – locational, limitational, and social – are not exclusive. In fact, they may function as a feedback loop, each serving to reinforce the others. For instance, research among the Hai||om bushpeople of Namibia shows that locational information is incorporated into daily life to a high degree, in large part due to what the ethnographer Thomas Widlok terms “topographical gossip.” Successful hunting and gathering in the bush depends on successful navigation. Hai||om hunters noted that “dead reckoning was possible because they had often observed others pointing to … places while talking about them” (Widlok 1997:321). Thus, the ubiquity of pointing and topographical gossip in Hai||om communication suggests that orientation skills are not solely responses to environmental stimuli but are facilitated by social interaction and information-sharing that take place over an individual’s lifetime. In turn, the social knowledge encoded in the stories recorded by Minc are a reflection of in-depth limitational knowledge. This is locational information informed by social information, which illustrates the interlinking nature of the various forms of environmental knowledge. It is unlikely that a human group would develop social knowledge of an environment without at least some locational information on critical resources; in turn, however, some of the social information may encode limitational-related experiences. So, in order to understand how each may contribute to Childe’s (and Trigger’s) “effective adaptation,” I suggest that it is most productive to consider them first from the perspective of the initiation of human contact with an environment – in other words, from the point of colonization. The archaeology of colonization is therefore integral to our overall understanding of how humans know and use their environment.

Knowledge in current models of colonization

The topic of colonization, along with the associated phenomena of migration, diffusion, and dispersal (from Gamble 1993; Graves and Addison 1995), has a long and varied history in archaeology. In the early days of archaeology, these phenomena were used as explanations of culture change (Trigger 1989). They were generally unpopular during the rise of New Archaeology (see explanation in Chapman and Hamerow 1997). More recently, they have been redefined as more biogeographically based processes that are themselves in need of explanation and that should be investigated in their own right (Diamond 1976; Gamble 1993; Kelly 1999; Steele, Adams and Sluckin 1998; Turner 1984).

The consideration of knowledge in colonization given here does not attempt to follow a particular archaeological paradigm. Rather, it has developed along with and in response to a number of recent studies of colonization of various types and origins. Chapman (1997) notes in his review of the history of migration in archaeological explanation that interest in migration has varied throughout the twentieth century with fluctuations in real-life population movements and invasions. The re-emergence of migration-oriented research and, by extension, colonization-related research in archaeology in the late 1980s and early 1990s may be related at least in part to the political reorganizations and corresponding population movements in eastern and wes...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• COLONIZATION OF UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• DATING ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS
• PART II: CASE STUDIES
• PART III: ADVANCES IN THEORY AND METHOD