Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide

William J. Meyer and Carole L. Crumley, “Historical Ecology: Using What Works to Cross the Divide,” in Tom Moore and Xosé-Lois Armada (eds), Atlantic Europe in the first millennium BC: crossing the divide (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 109-34.

Meyer and Crumley explore historical ecology as a research approach to studies of the first millennium BCE and outline how a research team could organise such a project. The article begins first by defining what history ecology is by turning to its historical development and its role not as a discipline, method, or theory but instead as a cluster or toolbox of concepts. Such conceptual tools include complex adaptive systems; resilience; diversity, region, and scale; risk and vulnerability; change and causation; agency; and heterarchy. The authors then apply these tools to a case study of Atlantic Europe in the first millennium BCE and explore questions of scale, operational principles, different data types such as biophysical and anthropogenic data as well as how to integrate and interpret this data. This last section on interpreting data explores how to organise and sequence an interdisciplinary historical ecological project and details five steps, where different clusters of groups and stakeholders meet and discuss at distinct stages. For Meyer and Crumley a historical ecology research design not only draws on diverse disciplines and concepts but also provides a new model for understanding the historical relation between culture and the environment in broader spatial and temporal terms.