SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES & DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY ARE PRESENTING A SPECIAL GUEST SEMINAR FEATURING DR. LISA MAHER ON: ‘Persistent Places: A comparative geoarchaeological approach to prehistoric hunter-gatherer landscapes’
When and where: Tuesday March 26, 2024. 10 - 11:30 am. Ellis Hall Rm 319.
Description of talk: Few cultural developments have taken on as much archaeological significance as when people began living in villages and producing their own food, leaving cumulative and often irreversible impacts on landscapes and biotic resources worldwide. Yet in Southwest Asia, during the preceding ten thousand years of prehistory, from 23,000-11,500 cal BP, hunter-gatherers initiated and experienced dramatic transformations that included building the earliest permanent houses and villages, storing food, developing a rich and diverse artistic repertoire, establishing wide-ranging social networks, intensifying plant use, domesticating the first animal (dog), and creating strong ties to specific places in the landscape as evidenced by some of the world’s earliest aggregation sites and cemeteries. Integrating multiple material cultural and environmental datasets, I discuss case studies from my fieldwork in Jordan and Cyprus to illuminate the value of frameworks of transported landscapes and landscape learning in considering how these hunter-gatherers and early farmers interacted with the world around them. The lessons drawn from these archaeological examples can provide insights into how these groups created and transformed their landscapes and allow us to draw connections between distant places and times to unravel the broad trends of human ecodynamics over the past 20,000 years.
Brief Biography: Lisa Maher received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and was a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. With a focus on prehistoric archaeology and geoarchaeological approaches to reconstructing human-landscape interactions, her research explores the ‘life-history of place’ and how landscapes are created through people’s relationships with each other, the environment, and the material world. She has been running archaeological projects in Jordan for over twenty years and worked in many other countries throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Western Asia. After spending many field seasons in the deserts of the Middle East, she recently expanded fieldwork to Cyprus and Hawaii to explore the arrival of hunter-gatherers and early farmers on these islands and how technological innovations, landscape learning and transported landscapes shaped adaptation to and modification of new environments. A central theme of her work is to explore and better understand the complex and nuanced ways people created, used and ‘lived in’ places, as well as the significant role humans have played in transforming the earth.