Human-landscape interaction in prehistoric central Europe: Analysis of natural and built environments
Abstract
In this paper, we examine human interactions within both the so-called natural environment and the so-called built, or architectural, environment. People exist in the world both as physical beings and as members of societies, and as such, they have sophisticated structures of behaviour, many ways of thinking, and various cultural traditions and roles.
Because people interact with and experience their world through these structures, roles and traditions, their interactions with the environment occur in diverse complicated ways. The result of these interactions, with people, animals, plants, communities, climatic conditions, accessible resources, hydrology, etc., creates what we call “built environments”.
Although increasingly sophisticated methods in the natural and formal sciences are opening new opportunities for archaeological research of these built environments, we still need to address the problem of methodological applications not being informed by social and humanistic sciences. In Central European archaeology specifically, stopping at the stage of methodology and working without an explicitly theoretical agenda, as if interpretation refers to nothing more than describing or reorganising data, remains a problem.
We therefore strive to incorporate social theory to human-environmental research, and offer scientific methods and social theories that complement each other. By reconstructing complete palaeo-landscapes and considering how people may have experienced, altered and (re)experienced these landscapes, we believe a more complete and inclusive archaeology is possible.
The aim of the paper is to find common threads in the research of the both poles and to find a way to the interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) approaches to human-landscape interactions in archaeology.