Reconstructing human landscape interactions

Reconstructing Human-Landscape Interactions demonstrates the high quality of work presented at the first Developing International Geoarchaeology conference (DIG 2005), held in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and exemplifies the over-riding theme of this discipline.

People have always used the landscape in many ways: as a place to live, as a place to grow crops, as a source of natural resources.

Those actions leave their traces. The characteristics of the landscape constrain which activities are possible, just as social and cultural habits condition people's connection with the environment.

Geoarchaeology is about finding the traces of these interactions, and using them to reconstruct how people in the past behaved in their environmental context.The material covered in the proceedings ranges from broad themes of climate change and landscape use, to more specific subjects such as river avulsion and the use of tidal ponds.

The papers move us from the land to the coastal margin and back onto land to examine particular techniques.

The final paper leads us beyond archaeology and points out that geoarchaeological data must contribute to the debate about the sustainability of present-day land-use practices: a fitting challenge to take us into the future.