Explaining the Past in 2010

  In 2010, archaeologists investigated diverse, multilinear human histories and disagreed about what forces shaped these histories most powerfully. The varied new work covered in this review is organized into three broad themes. First, research on the relationship between people and environments included topics such as domestication and anthropogenic landscapes, social responses to environmental crisis, and adaptation. Second, archaeologists studying nonstate societies discussed the basis of inequality, the dynamics of early villages, kin organization (incl. “house societies”), lineage commemoration, social memory, and monumentality. A third body of literature concerned the complex interactions within, between, and around states, including colonial powers; here, archaeologists particularly emphasized the intersection of imperial or colonial processes with local actors. In all three themes, a focal interest concerns the extent to which local and regional histories were forged by conditions or by human actions and their chains of consequences.