TY - JOUR

T1 - An agnostic approach to ancient landscapes

AU - Winder, Isabelle Catherine

AU - Winder, Nick P.

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - We argue that the phenomenological or ?agnostic? approach to evolutionary systems advocated by Thomas Henry Huxley is applicable in anthropological archaeology and show how agnosticism helps defuse the tension between humanists, natural philosophers and natural historians in integrative research. We deploy problem-framing methods from policy-relevant research in a palaeoanthropological context, developing a model of complex (scale-dependent, irreversible) causality and applying it to the problem of human-landscape interaction and primate foot anatomy. We illustrate this process with a single iteration of the ?project cycle? focussed on human-landscape interaction. Modern humans are co-operative resilience feeders, exploiting complex causality by perturbing stable, unproductive landscapes and feeding on the fluxes of energy and resources released as they spring back. Is it possible that this resilience-feeding is older than Homo sapiens?

AB - We argue that the phenomenological or ?agnostic? approach to evolutionary systems advocated by Thomas Henry Huxley is applicable in anthropological archaeology and show how agnosticism helps defuse the tension between humanists, natural philosophers and natural historians in integrative research. We deploy problem-framing methods from policy-relevant research in a palaeoanthropological context, developing a model of complex (scale-dependent, irreversible) causality and applying it to the problem of human-landscape interaction and primate foot anatomy. We illustrate this process with a single iteration of the ?project cycle? focussed on human-landscape interaction. Modern humans are co-operative resilience feeders, exploiting complex causality by perturbing stable, unproductive landscapes and feeding on the fluxes of energy and resources released as they spring back. Is it possible that this resilience-feeding is older than Homo sapiens?

KW - Agnostic

KW - Landscape

KW - Hominin

KW - Palaeoanthropology

KW - Phenomenology

KW - Project cycle

M3 - Article

VL - 9

SP - 3

EP - 30

JO - Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History

JF - Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History

ER -