Environmental archaeology

Environmental archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which emerged in the 1970s and seeks to use archaeological data to reconstruct the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in. It utilizes approaches from paleoecology to study past environments through the methods of human paleoecology and other geosciences. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provides archaeologists with insights into the origins and evolution of anthropogenic environments and human systems. This includes subjects such as prehistoric lifestyle adaptations to change and how economic practices have affected the environment.

Environmental archaeology often involves studying plant and animal remains in order to investigate which plant and animal species were present at the time of past habitations, and how past societies managed and interacted with them. It may also involve studying the physical environment and how similar or different it was in the past compared to the present day. An important component of such analyses represents the study of site formation processes.

This field is particularly relevant when artifacts may be absent from an excavated or surveyed site, or in cases of earth movement, such as erosion, which may have buried artifacts and archaeological features. While specialist sub-fields, for example bioarchaeology or geomorphology, are defined by the materials they study, the term "environmental" is used as a general template in order to denote a general field of scientific inquiry that is applicable across time periods and geographical regions studied by archaeology as a whole.