A Lesson in Applied Archaeology
Table of Contents- Part I: Introduction
- Part 2: Recreating Raised Field Agriculture
- Part 3: Implications of the Research
- The Politics of Agriculture
- The Future of Applied Archaeology
- The Downside of Applied Archaeology
- Future Projects
- Spanish Language Version, Alvaro Higueras
The Negative Side of Applied Archaeology
As an archaeologist, I feel that insights from our long-range perspective on the environment has the most potential for application in the contemporary world. Landscapes throughout the world are large-scale cultural artifacts built by farmers. The archaeological remains of mundane everyday life of the past—fence lines, walls, paths, roads, fields, etc.—can provide us with evidence of "what worked" and "what didn’t work" as people created and transformed these landscapes, sometimes over vast periods of time. We have cases of ancient societies that packed tens of thousands of people on landscapes for thousands of years that today can’t support more than a few people per square mile. The prehispanic raised fields in the Lake Titicaca basin are found on wetlands lands that are classified on government maps by agronomists and developers as the lowest potential for economic landuse—"for wildlife use only." It is a good thing that the ancient farmers didn't have access to those maps! Archaeology is the only way to really learn about how past peoples transformed most of the earth into productive gardens and fields. In places where the traditional systems of landuse have been lost, experimental archaeology can help us recover the vast technological knowledge involved in growing crops in marginal regions and moving soil and water. In most cases, indigenous models of landuse, prehistoric or traditional, are more preferable in terms of sustainability than technologies introduced from the outside. This is not to say that ancient peoples did not "mess things up" now and then—there are plenty of examples of prehistoric environmental degradation. In either case, we can learn about how to manage the environment in a sustainable manner from peoples of the past.This is by no means a 'new' perspective on the past. My colleague Bill Denevan and his intellectual 'children' and "grandchildren" are the pioneers in the study of the rural knowledge and technology that is embedded in the landscapes of the Americas. In anthropology, there is an interesting new movement to make anthropology more relevant to the contemporary world. It combines the best of both the applied and the academic side of anthropology in what has been called "public interest anthropology."
There is a negative side to "applied archaeology." A rather naïve romantic perspective about the past often gets promoted in the popular press. I’ve read articles praising raised fields as the solution to world poverty, and the alternative to modern agriculture. In our enthusiasm in promoting raised fields, my colleagues and I often inadvertently give the false impression that if farmers living in appropriate environments were to adopt raised fields, their agricultural problems would be solved. Raised field agriculture developed and flourished in a particular historical (or in this case, prehistoric) context. I’m convinced that the basic technology is sound, but I doubt that it will be adopted by many farmers, even in the Andes where it was developed. The social, political, economic, and demographic situation today is very different from what it was when raised field agriculture was being used. This is why some rehabilitated fields get abandoned and why many farmers won’t try the technology without strong incentives. Why farmers reject the technology is as interesting to me as why they accept it. We have to also remember that since the raised fields were completely abandoned, the technology is considered by local farmers to be just as new, foreign, and risky as the western technology promoted by most development organizations.
