HERCULES: studying long-term changes in Europe’s landscapes

This paper presents the outlines of a new EU-funded research program for the long-term history, present-day management and further development of the European landscapes, including their natural and cultural heritage: HERCULES. One of the subprojects of this program (Work Package 2) links archaeological, historical and historical ecological data to the analysis of geo-information in order to develop models of long-term landscape change in three carefully chosen study regions in the Netherlands, Sweden and Estonia. This is framed theoretically by integrating insights from landscape biography, historical ecology and complex systems theory. The linking and analysis of data will be done using a Spatial Data Infrastructure and by means of dynamic modelling

Does environmental archaeology need an ethical promise?

Environmental catastrophes represent profound challenges faced by societies today. Numerous scholars in the climate sciences and the humanities have argued for a greater ethical engagement with these pressing issues. At the same time, several disciplines concerned with hazards are moving towards formalized ethical codes or promises that not only guide the dissemination of data but oblige scientists to relate to fundamentally political issues. This article couples a survey of the recent environmental ethics literature with two case studies of how past natural hazards have affected vulnerable societies in Europe's prehistory. We ask whether cases of past calamities and their societal effects should play a greater role in public debates and whether archaeologists working with past environmental hazards should be more outspoken in their ethical considerations. We offer no firm answers, but suggest that archaeologists engage with debates in human-environment relations at this interface between politics, public affairs and science

Putting to (information) work : A Stengersian perspective on how information technologies and people influence information practices

Instead of merely subscribing to an unspecific inseparability in the co-constitution or mangle of information technologies and human-actors, there is a need for conceptual tools to describe and explicate the mechanics of how the enmeshment of technologies and human-beings is occurring in information contexts: how information technologies are both setting standards of the social conduct of information practices, and how people are using information technologies to regulate the social process. Building on an empirical study of human-technology relations in the context of archaeological information work, this article discusses how the imaginary of putting Stengers to work can make a contribution to such an end. Stengers describes an ideal system of human-actors and technology working seamlessly World-as-Clockthat is unattainable but can serve as a benchmark and a lens for understanding frictions and discrepancies in the cohesion of the two