From the archaeology of settlement to the biography of landscapes: Polish archaeology and the contemporary prospects for research on the relationship between humans and the environment in the past

Abstract

The paper contains a review of theoretical and methodological approaches to the issue of archaeological research on the relationship between humans and their environment in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. In culture-historical and processual archaeology, settlement research plays an important role both in American New Archaeology and in Polish archaeology, emphasizing the ecological and economic determinants of spatial settlement patterns. Post-processual archaeology introduced an interest in the landscape, which is understood to be a result of the mutual interactions of humans and the environment, with an emphasis on intangible, symbolic aspects and mental imaging of the landscape. An attempt to synthesize these research orientations is what compels the writing of cultural biographies of landscapes, in which, apart from the results of scientific research, elements of folklore and social memory are also taken into account.

Keywords

• patial organization of culture
• settlement patterns
• cultural biography of landscape
• heoretical orientations in archaeology