This volume is an appropriate and excellent tribute to one of the most important figures in transdisciplinary anthropology—Carole Crumley. The range of subject and emphasis in the contributions shows the influence of Crumley and her scholarship. Threads that were spun as far back as the 1940s have been woven into scholarship around the world—and through several millennia. The quality of the individual contributions is very high throughout the volume, which makes it very difficult to select any one chapter—or even any 10—to highlight. Fifteen chapters are arranged into four parts: (1) Ideologies and Applications of Historical Ecology and Heterarchy; (2) Identifying Resilience; (3) Social, Settlement and Territorial Dynamics of the European Iron Age; and (4) Ritual Landscapes and Monumentality.
Several chapters (including Inés Sastre and Brais Currás’s work in northwestern Iberia, and Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas’s work in the Valley of Oaxaca) illustrate the utility of the concept of heterarchy when it is brought into play in a well-known local context. Despite the ongoing efforts of many, heterarchy is often cited as some kind of antithesis of hierarchy. During the transition from the Iron Age to the Roman period in Europe, trends in features such as material culture (how warriors are depicted in statuary) and settlement patterns (hill forts or oppida) illustrate complicated developments in political relationships. In the example from Oaxaca, the importance of lineage in establishing political authority at Lambityeco makes the story of political change less patterned and more historically contingent than might be expected in the region. These and other contributors show how the concept of heterarchy helps us better understand long-term histories (however they are recovered) in very different times and places.
A second theme emerges in Seth Murray, Elizabeth Jones, and Scott Madry's work on agrarian resilience in Burgundy, as well as in Thomas McGovern, George Hambrecht, and Megan Hicks’s work around Lake M'yvatn in Iceland: deeper insight into long-term relationships between human societies, the institutions that help guide them, and specific aspects of the environment with which they interact. Historical ecology depends on the study of a particular context over long periods of time and at a variety of spatial scales. But crucially, it also rewards long-term research by the same people (or perhaps “lineages” of people) in the same place. In Iceland, local responses to a cooling climate would have been missed if only one three-year grant cycle of research had been carried out. In Burgundy, a comprehensive picture of land-use change over centuries—incorporating forests, ponds, cattle, grain, and vines—has taken decades to develop. Although research projects change over time as new methods and new techniques are developed, they benefit from a sustained commitment on the part of the researchers. Insights into questions that could not even be asked can result from partnerships that are maintained on a longer basis, showing a deeper commitment. Links between knowledge and location are not easily built, but the rewards of creating and maintaining them are illustrated here.
The editors should be congratulated for bringing together a group of papers with such consistently high quality. The contributors have presented useful insights of many kinds, including theoretical considerations of dialectics and scale (William Marquardt), the contribution of heterarchy to feminist archaeology (Janet Levy), collective action theory and the history of archaeology (T. L. Thurston), Mongolian funerary monuments as a means of editing the landscape (Erik Johannesson), and dialectical relationships between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, elephants, and cattle near Great Zimbabwe (Anneli Ekblom, Paul Lane, and Paul Sinclair). Throughout, the volume has high production values—including well-reproduced images, maps, and figures—and a general lack of technical errors.
In combination with its comprehensive bibliography, Historical Ecologies, Heterarchies and Transtemporal Landscapes could be used as a reader's companion to this growing and improving transdisciplinary literature. It could anchor an upper-level course on environmental anthropology or archaeology, but it should certainly be read more widely. Historians, ecologists, economists, sociologists, climate scientists, ethnobotanists, cultural anthropologists, historians of science, and political scientists could find it useful to bring depth to a variety of courses. Although the book could be used by selecting individual chapters (the section on the European Iron Age, for example), doing so would miss out on the analytic power of the historical ecology approach or of heterarchy as a framework. The foreword by William Balée and the afterword by Crumley help to bind this work together. Historical Ecologies, Heterarchies and Transtemporal Landscapes shows how Crumley's perspectives on historical ecology and heterarchy have increased in relevance since she helped spin those two threads into a single cord.
