This chapter examines the importance of integrating archaeological perspectives within contemporary environmental anthropology. It does this through exposing key questions raised by environmental anthropologists concerning West African relations with soil and forests that can only be addressed through collaboration with archaeological investigation (see also Balée, Chapter 3 this volume). Environmental anthropological research has been particularly important in revealing the ecological knowledge and environmental practices of land users and how these practices interplay with ecological and economic processes in the shaping of landscapes. This research has systematically undermined a paradigm of environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’, ‘equilibrial’, or ‘pristine’ environments (whether of soils, forests, or faunal assemblages). Whilst equilibrial ecology is apparently no longer upheld in ecological sciences either, in its shift to non-equilibrium ecology and recognition of path dependency, and whilst nature is no longer so easily configured simply as the absence of people, assumptions rooted in such simplistic ideas of nature still strongly inform and mislead the way West African environments are understood and problematized. Anthropologically derived critiques of the way landscapes are understood have been associated with a rereading of the history of those landscapes. Yet given how oral historical and anthropologically derived historical evidence can so easily be delegitimized and dismissed by apparently ‘harder’ sciences, environmental archaeology becomes a crucial player in these debates. In this brief chapter I shall focus on two key debates which can only be resolved (or reconceptualized) through environmental archaeology. The first of these concerns the degradation (or otherwise) of soils and vegetation linked to farming in West Africa’s Guinea savannah and forest-savannah transition zones. The second concerns the legacy of past land use on current ‘old growth’ forest in the Central and West African humid forest zones. These are not only interesting debates, but are at the heart of sustainable development policy deliberation in West Africa. The continued power of the paradigm in environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ environments is visible in the way that landscape features are often interpreted uncritically as ‘relicts’ of that nature.
Book review: <i>Power in Conservation. Environmental Anthropology Beyond Political Ecology</i>
