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Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology
Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands
Columbia University Press
Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-231-13562-9
Chapter One
THE PERSPECTIVE OF HISTORICAL ECOLOGY
HISTORICAL ECOLOGY IS a powerful perspective for understanding the complex historical relationship between human beings and the biosphere. The present volume proceeds from the axiom that humanity in its historic paths across earth has interceded in material and measurable ways in a biotic world that evolved previously by natural selection and other evolutionary forces, and that the changes thus imposed on nature have in turn been reflected in human cultures, societies, and languages through time. In effect, historical ecology encompasses the view that wherever humans have trodden, the natural environment is somehow different, sometimes in barely perceptible ways, sometimes in dramatic ways. The authors in this volume have been trained in various disciplines, including anthropology (especially the subdisciplines of archaeology and sociocultural anthropology), geography, plant genetics, integrative biology, and general ecology, and they recognize the interdependence of these fields in attempting to comprehend the effects and countereffects of human behavior in the lowlands of the New World Tropics (Neotropics). The Neotropics are the torrid zone of theNew World, and the lowlands within them are tropical in climate, moist, usually heavily forested, and at altitudes below approximately 500 meters. As shown in this volume's case studies, the neotropical lowlands exhibit classic anthropogenic or cultural landscapes formed over thousands of years.
Historical ecology is an interdisciplinary approach. It focuses on the historical landscape, a multidimensional physical entity that has both spatial and temporal characteristics and has been modified by human activity such that human intentions and actions can be inferred, if not read as material culture, from it. The landscape is like a text, but not one that is readily accessible to historians' and epigraphers' methods because it is not written in a decipherable script, but rather is inscribed in a subtle, physical sense by learned, patterned behavior and action-what anthropologists traditionally refer to as culture. Culture is physically embedded and inscribed in the landscape as nonrandom patterning, often a palimpsest of continuous and discontinuous inhabitation by past and present peoples. In contrast to text-based approaches, the historical perspective taken by practitioners of historical ecology also includes prehistory. This version of historical ecology is explicitly people centered or anthropocentric, in contrast to other human-environmental approaches that tend to reify extra-human and noncultural phenomena, such as natural selection, kin selection, self- organization, climate change in prehistory, ecosystemic change in prehistory, and ongoing randomness of pattern and event in the environment (Botkin 1990; Egan and Howell 2001a, 2001b; Gunn 1994; Kohler and Gumerman 2000; Winterhalder 1994). Our historical ecology also stands in sharp contrast to the neoenvironmental determinism popular in archaeology today (deMenocal 2001; Fagan 1999, 2000; Kolata 1996, 2002; McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000).
As such, landscape ecology, which has been practiced almost exclusively by population ecologists, biologists, and conservationists, is not the same as historical ecology because landscape ecology has distinguished between landscapes without human influence (a modern version of the allegedly pristine environment, or what William Denevan [1992] aptly describes as the "pristine myth") and landscapes with human influence, usually assumed to be degraded or simplified (Alvard 1995; Alvard and Kuznar 2001; Chew 2001; Krech 1999; Redford 1991, Redford and Stearman 1993; Redman 1999; Soulé and Lease 1995; Stearman and Redford 1992). Historical ecology does not treat humans as simply another animal in a complex web of organisms, or as one species among many in an ecosystem understood within a system based on equilibrium and process. Rather, the human species can be understood as a "keystone" species (Mann 2002) and as a mechanism of environmental dynamics principally through disturbance (Balée 1998b), which sometimes enhances species diversity and landscape richness (Botkin 1990; Connell 1978).
In the perspective of historical ecology, natural environments, once modified by humans, may never regenerate themselves as such. The product of the collision between nature and culture, wherever it has occurred, is a landscape, the central object of analysis in historical ecology. Archaeologist and historical ecologist Carole Crumley points out that "historical ecology traces the ongoing dialectical relations between human acts and acts of nature, made manifest in the landscape. Practices are maintained or modified, decisions are made, and ideas are given shape; a landscape retains the physical evidence of these mental activities" (1994a:9, emphasis in original). The landscape is where people and the environment can be seen as a totality-that is, as a multiscalar, diachronic, and holistic unit of study and analysis. In historical ecology, the anthropogenic landscape is a form of the built environment, often having been intentionally designed as architecture or as some other symbolic appropriation of nature that has patterned, physical underpinnings.
In this sense, human agency is expressed as intentionality in resource management (Balée 2003; Posey 2002); sophisticated strategies of land use (Erickson 2000b, 2003), and structured productive activities within the landscape (Heckenberger et al. 2003). The physical record of intentionality is key to understanding interrelationships between human society and its biotic environs over multiple temporal and spatial scales. The authors of the case studies in this volume and of other works in historical ecology and allied viewpoints (Balée 1998a; Cormier 2003; Crumley 1994b, 1998; Egan and Howells 2001; Ellen, Parkes, and Bicker 2000; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Lentz 2000; Li 1999; Zimmerer and Young 1998) present the evidence for the contemporary, historical, and archaeological centrality of these concepts.
Historical ecology is probably not a paradigm in the sense provided by Thomas Kuhn (1970), who doubted that such paradigms occur at all in the social sciences. Paradigms require overwhelming consensus in the scientific community, and all essential problems in the field (in this case, research problems concerning long-term relations between humans and the environment) need to have their own models of explication and deduction generated from the paradigm in order to have validity. Such consensus does not yet exist with regard to historical ecology, nor has historical ecology yet developed a wide range of models. Various authors have employed the term historical ecology to emphasize climatic change, geomorphological processes, environmental history, value of historical documents, and human ecology (Biersack 1999; Egan and Howells 2001; Gunn 1994; Moran 2000; Rival 2002; Sugden and Stone 2001).
Some of this confusion regarding the meaning of historical ecology seems to be an initial reaction to what we consider to be a radically new idea-namely, that humans can and have at different times and places increased the richness and equitability of nature by enhancing biodiversity (especially alpha diversity, or diversity in a restricted locale), soil fertility, and landform heterogeneity (in this volume, see chapters 1, 5, 7, 9, and 10). Humans can also decrease richness and equitability, but that is not a new observation (see Kirch and Hunt 1997; Orlove and Brush 1996). Scholars who subscribe to historical ecology as we define it in this book have tended to reject the assumptions of earlier approaches-such as cultural ecology, 1 human ecology, systems theory, and systems ecology-in proposing this perspective on human relationships with the environment over time. Historical ecologists disclaim the adaptationist assumptions of cultural ecology (and its congeneric modeling systems, such as behavioral ecology, systems ecology, self-organizing systems, sociobiology, and cultural materialism) (Diamond 1997; Harris 1979; Kohler and Gumerman 2000; Lansing 2003; Meggers 1996, 2001; Smith and Winterhalder 1992). Adams lumps these various approaches, which for him are ultimately deriving from the cultural ecology of Julian Steward, under the term etic rationalism: specifically, one axiomatic part of cultural ecology that is repudiated in historical ecology concerns the concept of adaptation, whereby cultures "must first and foremost adapt themselves to the resources and opportunities of their particular environments, and this is the main explanation ... for conspicuous differences between one culture and another" (1998:66). In the Amazon region, the adaptationist model has been referred to as the "standard" model (Stahl 2002; Viveiros de Castro 1996), and it still has its defenders (Headland 1997; Meggers 2001; Moran 1993). Likewise, systems ecology considers the environment and its physical constraints on organisms, their food supplies, and their populations to be hegemonic, self-sustaining, self-organizing entities. Ecosystem ecologists do not envision the ideal environment as intrinsically subject to long-term, sometimes profound change by individual organisms, particularly through the associated technologies and environmental know-how of human societies, except where those changes produce significant degradation and biological simplification of the previously existing environment (Moran 1990; Rappaport 2000). Conservation biology likewise corresponds to these sets of theoretical understandings with the added proviso that human activity in the environment is destructive (Pullin 2002; Soulé and Orians 2001). The concepts of the ecosystem, systems ecology, and cultural ecology ultimately tend to deny human agency in positively shaping the environment over time (Kohler and Gumerman 2000; Lansing 2003; Moran 1990, 2000).
Research in historical ecology instead focuses on how human societies, instead of adapting their subsistence activities, seasonal schedules, population size, settlements, and so on to preexisting constraints in the environment (Meggers 1996, 2001; Gross 1975; Harris 1979; see also critiques in Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 1999; Heckenberger et al. 2003; Stahl 1996, 2002; and in Clements, chapter 6, and Erickson, chapter 8, this volume), begin at once to transform most of those constraints into negligible analytic phenomena as concern suites of species, their alpha diversity, and other significant environmental features, as well as the availability of these resources for human utilization and modification within what demonstrably have become constructed and managed landscapes. In other words, environments are in a sense adapted to the sociocultural and political systems (or to humans' needs and desires) that have coexisted with them, sometimes for long periods of historical time. Historical ecology is not the same as landscape ecology (cf. Moran 2000:69). That is, historical ecologists disavow the view that humans are essentially automatons in terms of their exploitative and acquisitive activities in their physical environs (Kirch and Hunt 1997); they understand this view to be a fallacy implicit in models deriving from sociobiology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural ecology, and systems ecology. In observing human behavior within such a framework, ethnographers need not a priori ask natives specific questions about environmental phenomena because natives' discourse on their intentionality and their behavior vis-à-vis the environment is typically seen by ethnographers as emic, or nonscientific. At the same time, their scientifically observable, or etic, behaviors are assumed to be already selected for, either by a cultural or naturalistic mechanism (Durham 1991; Harris 1979; Rindos 1984) and are seen as economically rational and environmentally "sound" (see Adams 1998:338).
Historical ecologists seek to liberate scientific inquiry into human/nature relationships from these assumptions not only by incorporating the observable effects of human activity and resource management into the very definition of the landscape, but also by admitting that the central species in this ongoing relationship is endowed with unique and formidable cognitive, intellectual, and aesthetic ability as well as with inimitable agency in terms of environmental resources and productive strategies. Popular print and film media have recently picked up on this idea (Mann 2002; Sington 2002). Historical ecologists support a version of cultural determinism, at least for more extreme cases, of long-term creation and maintenance of engineered landscapes in the Americas (Balée 1989; Denevan 2001; Doolittle 2002; Erickson 2000b, forthcoming; Raffles 2002; Stahl 1996, 2002; Viveiros de Castro 1996; Whitmore and Turner 2002).
Perhaps a better philosophical guideline is to consider historical ecology as a research program (Lakatos 1980). The natural sciences have mechanisms for comprehending change in the environment, such as the laws of thermodynamics, relativity, and natural selection. Evolutionary ecology (also known as behavioral ecology) contains proposals of an interdependence of human genes and environmental conditions and constraints (e.g., Smith and Winterhalder 1992), whereas coevolution (Rindos 1984) exhibits a focus on an assumed interdependence of human genes and specific cultural phenomena. In contrast to historical ecologists, supporters of both approaches tend to deny human agency in the environmental milieus that encompass known societies. There is no need for consciousness of action or intentionality, moreover, in these models. Natural selection explains the evolution of species, whereas the social sciences only approximate such a mechanism by focusing on historical events, their chronology, and retrodiction (not prediction) of the motivating forces of history.
What historical ecology harbors as an explicit proposal is that the human species is itself a principal mechanism of change in the natural world, a mechanism qualitatively as significant as natural selection. In addition, the human species is not just a product of natural selection (though it is partly that) because it too makes histories and specific landscapes that bear its inscriptions. The cumulative effects of these undertakings influence the development and form of the exact cultural qualities of contemporary landscapes and are manifested in them.
Each major environment of the earth has a unique and often complex human history embedded in the local and regional landscape. Understanding the human role in the creation and maintenance of this uniqueness is a central goal of historical ecology. This approach involves the study of human effects on other life-forms, wherever they exist; historic changes in cultures due to these effects; and continuing (i.e., ethnographically documented) human effects on nature, sometimes in ways that increase the complexity and heterogeneity of the landscape through phenomena such as enhanced soils (Hecht 2003; Hecht and Posey 1989; Lehmann et al. 2003; McCann, Woods, and Meyer 2001; WinklerPrins 2001; Woods and McCann 1999), hydrology (Erickson, chapter 8, this volume; Raffles 2002), and species composition (Balée 1998b; see also Stahl, chapter 4, and Erickson and Balée, chapter 7, this volume).
Historical ecology is associated with some of the tenets of the new ecology (Botkin 1990; Little 1999; Scoones 1999; Zimmerer 1994; Zimmerer and Young 1999) such as "non-equilibrium dynamics, spatial and temporal variation, complexity, and uncertainty" (Scoones 1999:479). It does not brandish the ecosystem concept (cf. Moran 1990, 2000; Rappaport 2000) because that term has historically corresponded to synchronic views of arbitrarily defined spatial units that lack historical contingency (that are, in other words, in a supposed state of equilibrium). Practitioners of the new ecology also reject the ecosystem concept's equilibrium assumption (Begon, Harper, and Townsend [1990] and Botkin [1990] refer to landscapes as "culturalized ecosystems"; see also Worster 1994:390-391; cf. Egan and Howell 2001b:2). In fact, landscapes represent histories that unfold in a biotic and cultural domain in which inscriptions of an array of human activities across the temporal spectrum may be discerned by research. Historical ecology undertakes to present a historical (human and cultural) accounting of seemingly naturalistic events and processes, as with other contingency-based approaches to human- environmental dynamics (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). But it is not environmental history (Balée 1998b; Moran 2000; Worster 1993) because environmental history, like human ecology or ecological anthropology, is a subject field, whereas historical ecology actually instantiates a distinctive perspective on such fields.
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