Archaeological and Historical Landscapes of South America: From Past Changes to Current Landscape Configurations

Dear Colleagues,

A growing body of scientific knowledge demonstrates that an improved comprehension of present environments and landscapes must be based on an understanding of their past states and processes of change, as well as of the factors, including human activities, that drove landscape evolution over time. This is because the driving forces in landscape change are strongly rooted in historical, long-term dynamics, including cultural, socio-political and economic changes, all of which are traditionally studied by the humanities. These factors act on and are conditioned by ecological variables and environmental processes in a complexity of multidimensional interactions that create the specificity and uniqueness of each landscape. Thus, understanding a landscape’s capacity to support a specific activity or set of activities during prolonged time periods—ultimately, for its sustainable use—requires a long-term and transdisciplinary perspective.

Landscape archaeology is an area of study that transcends the conventional boundaries between research fields, providing interdisciplinary perspectives and tools for addressing questions on why and how landscapes have evolved, including the interaction between societies and the environment. Temporality, spatiality and materiality are all addressed by landscape archaeology studies, which can therefore offer a pluriversal view of landscapes, their singularity and their evolution, and disentangle the complex trajectories that have shaped current landscapes through time.

While questions still outnumber answers, in the last few decades, the study of landscape has shown an important development in South American Archaeology and Anthropology as a result of renovated theoretical and methodological approaches that include different ontological perspectives. The archaeological study of mountains, lowlands and indigenous agrarian landscapes; the study of commons, conflict and resistance; and the recent advances in archaeoastronomical investigation, among others, have become key areas of innovation in the South American landscape research scenario, with an increasingly prominent role of local communities in the investigation and management of their lands and in the construction of historical narratives.

In this Special Issue, we welcome papers that address the investigation of South American landscapes; their multiple ontologies; their characteristics, configuration and change; and how the archaeological view can inform present-day landscape use and management. Notably, we welcome contributions that:

1. Test existing narratives around historic land use;
2. Provide case studies demonstrating reasons for land-use change and resource use in the past and socioecological implications of these changes.
3. Present cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of the origins of landscapes and their change, resilience and sustainable use in terms of thresholds and tipping points.
4. Provide data that validate or test models of long-term change and advance our understanding of the relationship between local, regional and global patterns and drivers, including political ecology perspectives.
5. Study how social relationships and cultural values shaped past and present perceptions of landscape.
6. Integrate diverse ontological perspectives—indigenous, community and ecofeminist, among others—and decolonial views in landscape research and management.

Problem-oriented, interdisciplinary contributions that take a diachronic approach for exploring these themes’ links with landscape governance and participatory approaches are encouraged, as well as works with a policy dimension regarding specific South American regions or continental overviews.

Dr. Camila Gianotti
Dr. Cruz Ferro-Vázquez
Guest Editors

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