Research concerning human–environmental relationships has been at the forefront of archaeological research for decades. This edited volume synthesises a broad area of research with contributions from various specialists. Their unique perspectives on the agentive quality of nature adds significant value to archaeological scholarship. Each author contributes to the overall conversation, pushing readers to consider the sheer power of the natural world beyond human intervention. Animals, plants and weather, among other environmental variables, are all drivers of the planet's homeostasis, and it is imperative, as argued through the book, to take into account the agency of these non-human actors when considering the role of humans in both the past and the present. This book challenges the traditional perspective that humans are the most profound influencers on the climates that they inhabit. Fundamentally this traditional view rejects the agency of non-human actors as being equal or more influential agents of impact on an environment. This volume addresses climatic mass events, incremental weather episodes and biotic environmental variables from different chronologic and geographic areas to create a thought-provoking mosaic of our planet's agentive forces beyond humans. The book is organised into 12 chapters that consider the agentive potential of mass events (e.g. hurricanes and earthquakes), incremental change (e.g. precipitation variability) and plants, animals and bacteria.
In the first chapter, editor and contributor Monica Smith considers anthropogenic climate change to introduce the fundamental themes of the volume, namely that human–environmental relationships are not one-sided but are defined by a degree of mutualism between human and non-human agents. Matthew Peros, Jago Cooper and Frank Oliva assess how hurricanes influenced cultural change within pre-industrial Japan, the Maya collapse in Mexico and the Taíno in Cuba. They emphasise that human responses to hurricanes may be reactive or proactive and argue for palaeotempestology's potential to better understand the positive and negative effects of hurricanes on human societies. In the third chapter, Kanika Kalra reviews South Asia's prehistoric and historic responses to monsoon cycles in both urban and rural landscapes through a chronological consideration of water acquisition and retention methods from the ancient Harappan northwest until the medieval period in peninsular India. Kalra's conclusion echoes throughout the book's following chapters: the more complex an institution or mode of resource acquisition is, the more unstable a society is in the face of a natural episodic or mass event that affects the resource. In the same spirit, Jordan Pickett highlights the agency of earthquakes in Roman cities to evaluate human responses in the wake of destruction, using the framework of resiliency, adaptiveness and transformation.
In the fifth chapter, Smith seeks to understand how humans began to wield and control fire through habituation, directed use and curation and the manufacture of pyrotechnical materials. Sara Juengst and colleagues investigate pathogens through microbescapes associated with the adoption of sedentism in the Titicaca Basin in South America during the first millennium BC. They compare two chronologically different assemblages of human skeletal remains, albeit with a significant difference in sample sizes, to conclude that with increased sedentism comes increased pathogenic exposure. In Chapter 7, Harper Dine, Traci Ardren and Chelsea Fisher use lidar data to determine how weeds possess agency within the ancient vegetative Maya landscape and their importance as a palimpsest of landscape knowledge and social memory. Katelyn Bishop masterfully categorises birds from New Mexico's Chaco Canyon into qualitative categories based on visibility and interaction potential to generate a catching score that renders the possibility of capturing the bird. This reflects the total invested time and skill of ancient Pueblo people to capture particular species of birds throughout the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. Seth Quintus and colleagues consider how once-productive environments in Polynesia quickly deteriorated due to the introduction or extinction of ecological agents such as birds, rats, bats and humans to an environment. Steven Ammerman continues the discussion of human–environmental mutualism by elaborating on animal agency, as demonstrated by the intensifying relationships of domesticated animals with humans to an animal's ability to become feral post-human intervention. Silvia Tomášková fuses testimonies from travellers and scientists to report on the significance of reindeer in the lives of Indigenous Siberians and their languages, religion and herding practices. John Robb poetically concludes the book on a rather existential note. In a provocative account about how people coped with crises in Europe before and after the Bubonic Plague, Robb challenges readers to reconsider what constitutes a crisis. He uses the perspective of our society, whose rigidity and complexity has put itself at risk for hyper-inflated responses to crises.
As communicated in the Introduction, each chapter hinges on ideas of agency, niche constructions and mutualisms. The variety of topics covered is well co-ordinated, with each chapter complementing the previous. Where some chapters highlight the potential for particular methods, others present a quantitative analysis of results based on data acquired by the author(s). Each chapter is written clearly and offers readers definitions when appropriate, making the book accessible to readers outside of the discipline. Overall, this book brings to light the significance of agency in the natural world and its mutualistic relationship with humanity. It serves as a potent reminder that humans are a part of this natural world and should consider all agentive forces when thinking about past and contemporary human societies.
