Modeling Resilience and Sustainability in Ancient Agricultural Systems

Abstract

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past.

Resilience (Republished)

“…But resilience is influencing the environmental sciences from agriculture to oceans as well as global environmental and climate change reflected in, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (e.g., O'Brien et al 2012) and in risk and disaster management (e.g., Berkes 2007, Tidball et al 2010, McSweeney and Coomes 2011, Djalante et al 2013). Resilience thinking is raised in the development literature and in diverse ontologies and epistemologies of the social sciences and the humanities (e.g., Hamel and Välikangas 2003, Redman 2005, Hegmon et al 2008, Simmie and Martin 2010, Robards et al 2011, Crépin et al 2012, Plieninger and Bieling 2012, Ebbesson and Hey 2013, Hall and Lamont 2013, Lorenz 2013, Lyon and Parkins 2013, Barrett and Constas 2014, Chandler 2014, Tidball 2014, Bourbeau 2015, Hobman and Walker 2015, Marston 2015, Sjöstedt 2015, Weichselgartner and Kelman 2015 and with diverse reactions from excitement to those that oppose the approach for diverse reasons (reviewed by, e.g., Brown 2014, Cretney 2014, Stone-Jovicich 2015.…”

Urban Resilience Discourse Analysis: Towards a Multi-Level Approach to Cities

“…The fact that definitions of sustainability and resilience are predetermined by the objectives of research was described as a "constructive tension" in resilience studies [54]. Through the qualitative analysis of these papers, we can reveal that papers considering adoption are mostly either about adoption of different sustainable practices, policies or systems in agriculture [55][56][57], or they address questions of implementation of different sustainability and resilience policies and standards [58]. Studies on disaster resilience often concern a community level from different perspectives: for example, in engineering context [59], from a tourism development [60] or water supply contexts [61].…”

Mediterranean archeology and environmental histories in the spotlight of the Anthropocene

“…In particular, the study of ecological modifications through technology, especially agriculture, has fostered important work on the scale and persistence of preindustrial landscape change (e.g., Foxhall, Jones, & Forbes, ). The long record of empirical analyses of ancient plant, animal, and human remains in excavations in the Mediterranean and Near East have shed light on past practices related to diet, food production, and health regimes in distinct climatic contexts (e.g., Marston, ) . Most recently, remote‐sensing techniques that use aerial and satellite imagery and geographic information systems, a tool for spatial analysis, have revolutionized the way archeologists discern landscape changes and human–environment relationships at multiple scales (e.g., Bevan & Conolly, ; Casana & Cothren, ) …”