Critical Geoarchaeology: From Depositional Processes to the Sociopolitics of Earthen Life

Abstract

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.