Preface

Monica L. Smith

Rarely does the backstory of an edited volume become part of the finished product, beyond a perfunctory mention of the conference or the confrérie of its inception. Typically, the months and years between the initiation of a group project and its fruition are dissipated through hazy memories of time lines, streams of correspondence, and the more firmly recalled moments of completion punctuated by helpful intervention from publishers, copyeditors, and layout designers. But the fact that the work on this particular volume straddles the time before, during, and, it is hoped, after the global pandemic gives us a particular philosophical vantage point worth marking. This is especially so because the subject of the book is an inquiry on the “power of nature” to shape and disrupt human lives. The premise, which seemed compelling enough when this project initially began, has become our collective lived experience in the interim.

This volume carries within its pages the Before Times of the merry company of handshakes and carefree crowding that we enjoyed at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conferences before the global Covid-19 pandemic and lands at the doorstep of what will come after it, the “New Normal” times that—as of this writing—we are not yet experiencing. As an authorial group, we want to recognize the isolation, loss, and unsettling uncertainties that permeated the incubation period of this volume. Most of the chapters were initially presented at the SAA meetings held in Washington, DC. By the time the finished offerings were ready for submission, the world had shut down in ways that sparked new, ongoing conversations among the authors and the commentators. Accordingly, the authors updated their manuscripts and kept in mind the internalized acknowledgment that the nature-culture interface is one in which humans often look on helplessly as Mother Nature deals the upper hand. In integrating new content that directly addressed the pandemic, we also were fortunate in securing contributions from Sara Juengst and colleagues and from John Robb as commentator.

Throughout the volume’s period of creation and beyond the archaeological subject matter of our initial focus, we recognized the many ways humans perceive the consequences of their interactions with the world around them. Perception itself is filtered by individual experience and personal philosophies, as well as by larger grouped effects of cultural expectations and the amplifying echo chambers of discourse within households, among communities, and at the level of the nation-state. As academics, we should not want to return to a pre-pandemic lassitude of simply accepting that there was a long human trajectory to the present; instead, we have been handed a once-in-an-epoch opportunity to recraft our understanding of humans’ place in the world. Conferences that are capitalizing on the forward momentum of our era are recognizing that human-nature interactions are dynamic, iterative, sometimes mutually constructive, and often mutually destructive. These include recent global conversations such as the “Archaeologies of Deltaic Ecology: Relevant Methods and Techniques for Engaging with Human and Non-Human Interaction in the Southwestern Part of Bangladesh,” organized by the Department of Archaeology of the Government of Bangladesh and Jehangirnagar University; and “Asia and the Anthropocene: Visions of Being Human in a More-than-Human World,” organized by the East-West Center of the University of Hawai‘i.

None of us writing this volume, and none of you reading it, will be quite the same people or inhabit quite the same social world. Our volume’s offerings about humans’ creative tenacity against the elements show that regardless of the time and place, our species’ effects on the planet are a work in progress and that the power of nature is (nearly) comforting in its assured continuity.