We Are But A Part of This World: A Biography of Landscape Approach to Tracing Human-Environmental Entanglement from the Mid to Late Pleistocene through the Holocene, and into the Anthropocene

This dissertation requires opening one’s mind regarding how we humans view the world. Applications of concepts like agency, authorship, and narratives to both human and nonhuman participants means taking a different look at these traditionally anthropocentric terms. Authorship is an important form of agency for both nonhuman and human participants, albeit in different ways. For example, a perched erratic boulder in Norway is both a participant and an author in a long ongoing narrative. Its genetic makeup is found in the history of the minerals that form it and its proximity to other boulders and former margins of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet make up the narrative that also overlaps with other geological features, ice, water, plants, animals, and humans. Humans have over a long time learned how to read these stories and from that understanding, they create their own. Folklore, myths, art, religious and spiritual perceptions, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) are ways humans have socially participated with landscape stories. Another way we participate as landscape readers and authors is through collecting and studying data. Geologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, historians, and many others contribute specialized pieces of these narratives, which include but are not limited to biochemical analyses, geomorphological processes, ice sheet movements, climate gradients, archaeological remains, and historical and cultural sources. What the Living Biographies of this dissertation do is put a number of these pieces together to depict the evolution of landscapes, the lives of past people and contemporary people (Ch. 6), and complex ongoing relationships between geologic, plant, animal, and human communities, which is what makes the biographies “living.” The scientific base of the methodology used in this dissertation is ecological archaeology—a combination of “traditional” archaeology (human-focused) and bio-archaeological research (i.e. botany, zoology, osteology, biochemistry), as well as geo- and earth science frameworks (i.e. soil core and chronostratigraphy diagrams). Ch 1: Looking Towards the Future by Understanding the Past is the opening chapter, introducing the central research question which this dissertation explores: What complex patterns of human-environmental entanglement can be traced across geographical space and through time using the Biography of Landscape approach? Ch 2: Redefining Eco-Narratives and Living Biographies explores the deep time relationships between humans and nonhumans and the importance of integrating empirical methods and theoretical frameworks. Ch 3: One Arctic, Many Stories introduced the Biography of Landscape approach applied within this dissertation. Beringia incorporates Northeastern Siberia (West Beringia), the former Beringian Land Bridge (Central Beringia) and Northern Alaska (East Beringia). Ch 4: Palaeolandscapes, Sacred Places, and Geomythology followed as the European companion to the Eurasian/North American Arctic. Fennoscandia incorporates Northwest Russia (including Karelia), Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Ch 5: A Tale of Two Rivers covered The Rhine-Meuse Delta and IJssel Basin (Central Netherlands) and the former Doggerland coast (Southern North Sea Coast, W. Netherlands), incorporating “we-narratives” (discussed in Ch. 2) to foreground the river system as the primary narrative. Ch 6: The Intersection of Eco-Crises, Industrial Colonialism, and Biocultural Heritage contextualized the Pleistocene – Holocene living biographies (Ch. 3 – 5) in the modern time of the Anthropocene.