Contingency and Agency in the Mountain Landscapes of the Western Pyrenees: A Place-Based Approach to the Long Anthropocene

Ted L Gragson,Michael R Coughlan,David S Leigh

doi:10.3390/su12093882

Abstract

Regional- and biome-scale paleoecological analyses and archaeological syntheses in the mountain landscapes of the western Pyrenees suggest that the Long Anthropocene began with agropastoral land use at the onset of the Neolithic. Historical and geographic analyses emphasize the marginality of the western Pyrenees and the role of enforced social norms exacted by intense solidarities of kin and neighbors in agropastoral production. Both are satisfying and simple narratives, yet neither offers a realistic framework for understanding complex processes or the contingency and behavioral variability of human agents in transforming a landscape. The Long Anthropocene in the western Pyrenees was a spatially and temporally heterogeneous and asynchronous process, and the evidence frequently departs from conventional narratives about human landscape degradation in this agropastoral situation. A complementary place-based strategy that draws on geoarchaeological, biophysical, and socio-ecological factors is used to examine human causality and environmental resilience and demonstrate their relationship with the sustainability of mountain landscapes of the western Pyrenees over medium to long time intervals.

Highlights

We focus in this article on contingency and agency in the “Long Anthropocene” in the Soule Valley of the western Pyrenees, where the Neolithic onset to agropastoral land use during the Middle Holocene marks an important transition in human-environment relations
We view the approaches as necessary complements and take a Long Anthropocene position in this article to draw attention to the complex dynamics of human-environmental interaction across the temporal and spatial scales at which the relationship unfolds in the western Pyrenees
Log distributions of sedimentary charcoal accumulation (CHAR) revealed that fire was uncommon until the early Neolithic, and results from colluvial records that began between ca. 18,000 BP (Mulhedoy) and ca. 14,000 (Ihitsaga) indicated that CHAR values were not detectable (

Summary

Introduction

We focus in this article on contingency and agency in the “Long Anthropocene” in the Soule Valley of the western Pyrenees, where the Neolithic onset to agropastoral land use during the Middle Holocene marks an important transition in human-environment relations. Long Anthropocene proponents have placed more attention on discovering the deep roots of human influence, progressively moving back through time in some instances into the Plio-Pleistocene, while giving attention to social in addition to geological dimensions of the relationship between humans and the earth (e.g., [4,5,6]). Proponents of both approaches have at times formulated deterministic accounts that capture the imagination, and the polemics between them may stem from what is a paradigm shift between environmental science and earth system science [7,8].

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