Two Article Tuesday

My summer reading list is an ever evolving grab bag and the sense of long, lazy summer days often encourages me to read without a strong sense of priorities (even if that means occasionally procrastinating on a book that I have for review or a manuscript that I’m peer-reviewing).

This past week, I read and enjoyed Catherine Kearns’s latest article “Climate the Antagonist” in a forum titled “Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis” in American Anthropologist. The forum is coming on line and I’m interested to reading all of the articles. That said, I’m always excited to see how an archaeologist who has working in Iron Age Cyprus is contributing to a larger conversation. Kearns’s article reminds us that the very concept of climate is historically constituted and not an essentialized or constant feature in understanding our world. Moreover, the concept of climate in the contemporary discourse of “climate change” derives primarily from a Northern European context. This notion of climate, particularly when applied at a global or long-term scale, has a tendency toward the kind of abstract generalizations that support the use of terms like sustainability and resilience. Kearns appeals to her work on Cyprus to demonstrate that for a concept like climate to be a meaningful contribution to historical and archaeological understandings of the past, it must be both local and historically contingent. This echoes many of the caveats issued by those who study lacustrine sediments or samples from caves as climate proxies. These samples are always only local proxies. Kearns reminds us that archaeologists are “are positioned well to highlight the incredible particularism and contingencies of these interrelationships as well as their unevenness and fitfulness: how choices in what and how to consume, produce, or discard are made by some at the expense of others; how human-environment relationships are imagined and made, and equally make complex societies at varying interrelated scales.”

When someone of the standing and history of John Bintliff writes an article titled “A brief history of archaeological surface survey” it is always exciting to see what he thinks is important to understand a practice with which I’ve been associated for over 25 years (in Festschrift für Günther Schörner zum 65. Geburtstag. Heidelberg: Propylaeum 2025, 165 – 175). Bintliff’s brief survey (cough) of the archaeological surface survey is well trod ground for most people familiar with the method. That said, his short article does draw into focus how the growing use if LiDAR imaging, for example, continues a tradition of regional level research focused on understanding the relationship between surface and sub-surface remains. This, in turn, contributes to the old-saw of site definition. We can quibble whether these priorities should remain central to the practice of intensive pedestrian survey (at least in the Mediterranean), but not that trajectory that Bintliff clearly recognizes in the history of the practice.