Organisers: Mark Haughton (Aarhus University) – Zachary Caple (Aarhus University) – Mette Løvschal (Aarhus University) 

Format: Standard paper session 

What counts as ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ in prehistoric landscapes is at once ontologically emergent and a matter for archaeological reconstruction. Recent scholarship collected under the banners of new materialisms, posthumanism, and assemblage theory encourages us to look beyond nature/culture binaries to recognize the myriad ways in which people and nonhuman forces co-construct the world. In archaeology, this has opened new ways of understanding humans' long-term relationships with material culture, animals, and plants, but not necessarily landscapes as a total socio-natural fact. 

In this session, we seek to push such theories further to consider the more-than-human assemblage dynamics of longue-durée landscapes. In our focus on the longue durée, we invite papers that explore the multi-temporal rhythms and histories that instantiate landscapes that stretch across geological, archaeological, and ecological time scales. Rethinking long-durée processes through more-than-human relations challenges how archaeologists approach settlement patterns, social organization, and subsistence practices. Consider, for example, the long-term enactment of south Scandinavian heathlands: In the Early Bronze Age, humans––in conjunction with fire and livestock––created vast open pastures of heathland across Western Jutland. Across the following centuries, these grazing commons were subject to intense parcelization and agricultural settlement. Despite this pronounced shift in social organization, heathland botanical assemblages continued to persist. Understanding such paradoxes of ‘continuity amidst change’ deserves theoretical scrutiny. We solicit papers that draw archaeological attention to new approaches, problematics, and conceptualizations of the more-than-human longue-durée. 

Potential session themes include:

· Archaeological reconstruction of human-nonhuman ontologies 

· The multiple temporalities of landscape becoming 

· Long-term dynamics of power, hierarchy, and extraction 

· Human-animal evolutions across the domesticate/wild divide 

· Intergenerational place creation and modes of dwelling 

See the full programme of the session here: Reconsidering the Longue Durée: archaeological landscapes in light of the material turn – Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group (nordictag.com) 

Mark Haughton will be presenting: "The long-term rhythms of multi-species entanglements on the prehistoric heath"

Abstract: 

Through the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, heathlands underwent a massive expansion across Northern Europe. This inherently unstable landscape form – requiring the grazing of herd animals and periodic burning to prevent it transforming into scrub and forest – has a remarkable persistence, enduring in places like Western Jutland, Denmark, for millennia. While this landscape was ‘utilised’ by humans in prehistory for the many resources it can provide, it was also much more than this – a dynamic assortment of different species that bring about a unique series of qualities.

In this paper, I consider the longue durée of heathland assemblages in the Danish Neolithic and Bronze Age, and particularly how the affordances of heathlands were forged by collaboration between humans, sheep, plant mosaics, and fire. I use traditional GIS practices to trace the lines of becoming in the heathland and uncover the more-than-human elements that are too often neither present in our accounts of prehistoric settlement and subsistence patterns nor our GIS analyses. Thus, varied forces are revealed to be entangled in heath maintenance in different ways which both open up and constrain pathways for action and movement in human communities. What emerges is at once familiar and strange – a picture of the heathland that is engaged across multiple boundaries and borders. Shifting perspectives to focus on heathland affordances allows us to encounter this landscape as more than a resource for extraction, but rather as a dynamic and active force across multiple scales.

Zac Caple will be presenting: "Fertilizing comparisons: the topological evolution of concentrational farming in Western Denmark, 500 BC-1900 AD"

Abstract

This paper interrogates the long-durée persistence of concentrational agriculture in the heathland plains of Western Denmark through a systematic comparison of the soil nutrient-management technologies of Iron Age and 19th-century heathland farms. Concentrational agriculture refers to practices of in situ nutrient transfer, either through horizontal transport of fertility from outlying areas to a permanent infield or vertical “pumping” of belowground stocks by plants in a relatively long fallow cycle. Before the advent of chemical fertilizers, concentrational farming represented the only means by which sedentary peoples could grow sufficient food in the heathland’s sandy oligotrophic soils.

In the Iron Age, people parceled out vast areas of heathland into Celtic fields in which they rotated between cropland, pasture, and heath-fallow. This shifting cultivation method contrasts with the infield-outfield system of the historical period in which farmers translocated vast quantities of nutrients from outlying areas into small permanent fields through hay cutting, composting, and manuring. The geographer Sofus Christiansen argues that these vertical and horizontal pumping strategies represent two polar types––one based on the exploitation of time, the other space––with theoretically identical production capacities. Moreover, he asserts that these types are topologically interchangeable: that a rotational fallow system can be morphed to produce an infield-outfield system, and vice versa. Christiansen levels this argument to posit that shifting cultivation is the ur-form of concentrational agriculture and that the infield-outfield system is a descendant type enacted through labor-intensive manuring chains.

In my comparison of the respective nutrient-management technologies, I look for functional echoes between the two periods suggestive of the 2400-year persistence of concentrational farming in Western Denmark, while also inquiring into the cosmological and political economic differences that might explain the adoption of more labor-intensive manuring.

Registration for Nordic TAG 2022 will close April 1st. Nordic TAG 2022 - Nettskjema 

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