Andrew M. Bauer

In the last several decades, geoarchaeological research and practice have moved well beyond their foundational concerns for site formation processes and the stratigraphic integrity of artifact associations, developing significant orientations toward archaeological and social theory. This review focuses on four overlapping research emphases that have explicitly extended the reach of geoarchaeological research within the broader social sciences and humanities, including (a) interpretive, symbolic, and social approaches in geoarchaeological research; (b) articulations with recent developments in posthumanist and new materialist scholarship; (c) the application of geoarchaeological investigations to historical ecology and political ecology research programs; and (d), building on the latter, critical engagements with ongoing transdisciplinary scholarship on the Anthropocene. Taken together, these different orientations offer new possibilities for geoarchaeological research to inform anthropological concerns for social and environmental production and the ways that archaeological and geological fields of practice and discourse contribute to shaping social, political, and environmental conditions today.

This paper considers the intersections of memorialization practices and politics throughout a period of emergent social differentiation during the Neolithic and Iron Age periods in the Deccan region of southern India. Rather than focus on how mortuary architecture and grave assemblages might correlate with the status, rank, or class of the deceased individuals—as has often been suggested—we place emphasis on how mortuary practices and the production of megalithic places contributed to the establishment and maintenance of social collectives among living communities. More specifically, we identify at least two modes of political practice associated with megalithic production in pre- historic South India: one related to the constitution of collectives of labor and shared consumption activities involved in the process of making monuments; and a second related to the material legacy of monuments in constituting cultural and historical places of social affiliation. In making these arguments about the social significance of megalithic places, we also critically consider new materialist and posthumanist theoretical frame- works in archaeology.

Definitions of 'historical archaeology' frequently imply the use of documentary sources to contextualise the archaeological record and aid interpretation of its content. In this article, I underscore the importance of a complementary process of using the archaeological record to enrich interpretations of epigraphical sources from the medieval Deccan. Going beyond others’ critical calls to evaluate how interpretations of these inscriptional sources are shaped by biases in research practices, I will suggest that the substantive content of politicised donative stelae on the Raichur Doab was related to shifting material contexts of agricultural land use and the dynamic assemblages of cultigens, soils and water that facilitated production during the period. By contextualising inscriptional records and donative practices within an archaeologically documented landscape of changing production activities, one has a stronger epistemological basis for evaluating the social and political significance of the inscriptional archive and the historiography that it affords. In this case, it allows for the re-evaluation of historiographical tropes of the Raichur Doab’s value as ‘fertile’ agricultural space and provides a richer interpretation of how newly emergent social relationships and distinctions evident in eleventh–sixteenth- century inscriptions articulated with landscape histories.

Water management and iron production were two socio-technical practices deeply entrained with the politics of emerging social distinctions in northern Karnataka during the South Indian Iron Age (1200–300 BCE). In this article, we approach resources by building a theoretical convergence between " resource materialities " and " techno-politics, " which allows us to assess the historically specific constitution of certain materials as culturally valued resources while maintaining analytical attention on how assemblages of technical practices and active material properties shape social conditions. By differentially anticipating and responding to the social and material distributions of a range of dynamic matter (for example, granitic rock, iron ores, bloom, and metal, water, soils, and vegetation), Iron Age peoples transformed substances into resources and simultaneously produced a historically unique political sociology of resource relations. Our approach dissolves the processual distinction between natural resource and cultural product and directs attention to how substances become resources through ongoing historical articulations of humans and nonhumans in contexts oriented by cultural values. Contrasting the material properties and distributions of iron and water resource assemblages allows us to more fully understand the distinctiveness of different forms of techno-politics and resource relations within the same cultural and historical context. [resource materialities, techno-politics, resource assemblage, entrainment, South Indian Iron Age]

This paper examines the political ecology of an 80 km 2 region of central Karnataka, detailing how social relationships of inequality were linked with the production of a variety of meaningful places and environmental resources in Iron Age (1200–300 BCE) South India. Such analysis is then intersected with modern framings of inselberg landforms as spaces of " Nature, " demonstrating how such framings potentially silence humans in their environmental history and reproduce a nature–society binary that has substantial implications for the politics of land use and conservation today. In doing so, the paper critically considers the implications and limitations of a posthumanist political ecology that advocates nonhumans as " actors " that contribute to socio-political histories for understanding the politics of environmental production, both past and present.

This paper combines analyses of Landsat 8 multispectral data with textual records and diachronic low- density artifact distributions to evaluate how soil differences were incorporated into social landscapes around the multicomponent site of Maski, southern India.

2015-16 Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 3: 403-426
This paper argues that categorical slippage between humans as “biological agents” and “geophysical agents” complicates the ontological foundations and periodization of the Anthropocene. After addressing this underlying issue, it discusses reasons to be cautious of the adoption of the Anthropocene as an analytical and historiographical frame: these include potentially perpetuating exclusionary social abilities to define desirable environmental conditions; silencing human experiences and conceptualizations of socioenvironmental conditions that are differentiated by history, geography, or culture; and promoting a regressive environmental politics. By downplaying the role of humans in environmental production during a prior period, the Anthropocene effectively reproduces a prior Nature—an external realm that exists outside of history and society—and thus might actually limit political responses to global warming.

The archaeology of southern India has long been dominated by cultural-historical paradigms, which have more recently become reliant on environmental stimuli to explain ‘‘culture change.’’ This interpretive framework has created a relatively fixed set of relationships between the environment and past human societies that oversimplifies issues of agency and causation in largely deterministic terms. At issue here is a lack of adequate treatment for the sociopolitical complexity of human-environment relationships. In this essay we examine the relationships between emerging social di¤erences and both stable and dynamic aspects of land use throughout the South Indian Neolithic (3000–1200 B.C.), Iron Age (1200–500 B.B.), and Early Historic (500 B.C.–A.D. 500) periods in the southern Deccan region of South India. In an e¤ort to contextualize land use in wider sociopolitical realms, we focus on the empirical components of three aspects of the archaeological record—animal use, agricultural regimes, and monument production and maintenance—through a lens of political ecology. Accepting that land use is socially and culturally mediated, we suggest how sociopolitical distinctions emergent during these periods could be viewed in relation to the production of a landscape that di¤erentially included wild and domesticated animals, cultivars, water reservoirs, irrigation agriculture, and monumental architecture. In this sense, we argue that the landscape itself could be seen as a social product through which sociopolitical di¤erences were experienced and perceived, and that the historical development of the landscape is both the artifact
and medium of sociopolitics in early South India. As such, the determinants of social history remain in social and cultural fields of action, though not removed from the ecological-material world of which people are a part.

This paper describes the impacts of Neolithic Period (c. 5000–3200 cal. BP) and Iron Age (c. 3200–2300 cal. BP) occupation and land use on the geomorphology of residual hills that punctuate an expansive planation surface in central Karnataka, South India. Analyses of archaeological survey data, soil and regolith profiles, remotely sensed metrics of hill morphology and distributions of soil and sediment, and paleoecological data indicate that cultural land use altered the morphology of these features and the distribution of soils on them, and consequently impacted the processes by which they continued to develop. Statistical regression models indicate that archaeological evidence for ancient land use is a significant explanatory variable for the proportion of remaining soil cover and exposed residual rock on the sampled hills. Moreover, multivariate regression models explaining soil removal on the hills are effective when including archaeological proxies for ancient land use along with other geomorphological variables. The combined effects of intensified agro-pastoral land use, vegetation changes, and variations in climatic humidity during the mid-Holocene to late Holocene appear to have facilitated erosional conditions that outpaced subsurface weathering. These findings imply that the refinement of models for the development of residual hills in South India, where early paradigms for explaining the evolution of such landforms were formalized, should consider the effects of Holocene land use where applicable. The findings also suggest that recent efforts to understand the unique ecology of these landforms should account for historical human land use.

In this study, we compiled unpublished archival documentation of archaeological site locations from the southern part of the Cuyahoga River Valley in northeastern Ohio, USA, registered at the State of Ohio Historic Preservation Office into a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database. Using digitized soil shapefiles to generate a geomorphic data layer, we assessed the spatial and temporal distribution of 79 known archaeological sites by landform association. This digital compilation indicates that Woodland period, Late Prehistoric, and Historic sites occur in most geomorphic settings along the river valley. In contrast, Paleoindian and Archaic sites only occur on Wisconsinan cut terraces and in upland interfluve settings, indicating that most of these documented sites are in primary contexts and have not been reworked. We discuss the distribution of archaeological sites in the study region as a function of various factors, including cultural activities, taphonomic processes, landform development, and the nature and extent of the original archaeological surveys. Observed spatial patterns of known sites clearly reflect local geomorphological controls; artifactual contexts from the earlier prehistoric periods are underrepresented in the database. We conclude that additional site surveys, as well as the excavation and documentation of new sites in this part of Ohio, are required to understand local prehistoric economies and to ascertain patterns of culturally mediated land use. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper employs geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze the relationship between environmental context and social inequality. Using recent archaeological data from the political center of the Inka Empire (Cuzco, Peru), it investigates how material and spatial boundaries embed social differences within the environment at both local and regional scales. In doing so, the paper moves beyond conventional archaeological GIS approaches that treat the environment as a unitary phenomenon. It develops a methodological and theoretical framework for the examination of a political landscape—the distinct spaces and materials that differentially shape people’s social experience and perception of their environment.