(A-2) Political Ecology

The workshop "Scales of Movement" placed early village communities more firmly into the discourse on spatial movement. Drawing from multidisciplinary approaches, the program encompassed contributions presenting specific archaeological cases as well as broader theoretical issues on prehistoric mobility.
In Egypt the earliest evidence of mixed farming practices are at present found in Merimde Beni Salama. More than 1700 archaeological objects excavated at this Neolithic site in the 1930s, have been identificated, recorded and re-evaluated. The collected data are publicated in an open access database | Image: J. Rowland
Due to a lack of information on burial areas with large burial mounds in the steppes of northern Pre-Caucasus, 43 necropolises of the Scythian period have been explored, 13 among them using archeological-geophysical methods | Image: Kurgan of Bi-Tjube necropolis, © Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation/ J. Fassbinder
The workshop "Revolutions" examined the transition from the Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic to the Neolithic, and the emergence of foodproducing economies in countries that border the Mediterranean Sea.

The research group “Political Ecology of Non-Sedentary Communities” encompassed three research projects examining archeological remains from various time periods in the Nile Delta, the foothills of the Kopet Dag and in the steppe region of western Eurasia; a fourth project in the group consisted of climate and ecological modeling for Europe over the past 6000 years.

AT A GLANCE

28	Researchers
3	Research Projects
4	Dissertation Projects
24	Publications
14	Events
12	Cooperating partners

The researchers in this group are investigating processes and dynamics which played out in different geographic spaces and different chronological periods between 9000 and 300 BCE. We propose a triad of three terms, Umgebung, Umwelt, and Mitwelt to serve as a concept for all of these projects, which varying greatly in terms of the chronological period, location and the way of life of the populations under study, as well as with respect to the archeological database.

The projects can be described on the basis of evidence of multifaceted practical actions. These actions on the part of the populations under study, revealed only fragmentarily in the archaeological record, were investigated using the research strategies presented here. The strategies have been developed from the discussion on political ecology associated with discourses in the social sciences and the humanities.

The Political Ecology of Non-sedentary Communities (Junior Research Group)

Research Group A-2

Research Projects

Dissertations