Archaeological Perspectives on Contested and Political Landscapes
9789048559435
282 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
This book focuses on alternative definitions of landscape in archaeology, particularly those that explicitly address landscapes’ political aspects. In doing so, this volume emphasizes the non-static, dialogic nature of landscape within a community and acknowledges how a community’s composition and its relationship with the landscape can lead to tensions and even violent conflicts with other groups. It highlights the relevance of considering movement, borders, and conflict as sources for understanding how people create their own landscapes and how they reshape them in times of political conflict. For example, in contexts of colonization and war, people are forced to adapt to new politics and hierarchies as they see their personal and communal understanding of the world deeply transformed, something visible even today as political tensions constantly reshape local and global landscapes. Understanding how landscapes were created and contested in the past is essential for understanding their political, economic, and cultural manifestations in the present in order to better organize ourselves for a truly integrative future.
Author Bio
Eduardo Herrera Malatesta is a Venezuelan archaeologist specialising in Landscape research, regional surveys, and Geographical Information Systems. He studied anthropology with a specialisation in archaeology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (BA) and Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (MA). He then specialised in GIS in archaeology at the University College London (MSc), and later, he got his PhD in Archaeology at Leiden University. He has held postdoctoral positions at Leiden University and later at Aarhus University as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow. He has recently started a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University.
