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Environmental archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology and is the science of reconstructing the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in. The field represents an archaeological-palaeoecological approach to studying the palaeoenvironment through the methods of human palaeoecology. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provides archaeologists with insights into the origin and evolution of anthropogenic environments, and prehistoric adaptations and economic practices.
Environmental archaeology is commonly divided into three sub-fields:
Other related fields include:
Environmental archaeology often involves studying plant and animal remains in order to investigate which plant and animal species were present at the time of prehistoric habitations, and how past societies managed them. It may also involve studying the physical environment and how similar or different it was in the past compared to the present-day. An important component of such analyses represents the study of site formation processes. This field is particularly useful when artifacts may be absent from an excavated or surveyed site, or in cases of earth movement, such as erosion, which may have buried artifacts and archaeological features. While specialist sub-fields, for example bioarchaeology or geomorphology, are defined by the materials they study, the term "environmental" is used as a general template in order to denote a general field of scientific inquiry that is applicable across time periods and geographical regions studied by archaeology as a whole.
Environmental archaeology has emerged as a distinct discipline in the course of the last 50 years. In recent years it has grown rapidly in significance and is now an established component of most excavation projects. The field is multidisciplinary, and environmental archaeologists as well as palaeoecologists work side by side with archaeologists and anthropologists specialising in material culture studies in order to achieve a more holistic understanding of past human lifeways and people-environment interactions.
A notable pioneer of environmental archaeology has been Karl Butzer.