Beyond metrics of resilience and survival in Mediterranean landscape archaeologies

Abstract In recent years, alongside increasing interest in collapse narratives, Mediterranean landscape archaeologists have turned to resilience theory and concepts like sustainability to examine the complexity of social responses to environmental stress and to counter a predominant focus on catastrophism and decline. Yet the revamping of systems theory has its pitfalls, most notably in its reductionist language, its sidelining of human agency and its privileging of normative claims of success or failure. In this paper I build on cross-disciplinary critiques of resilience to highlight problems with metrics of stability or vulnerability, macrohistorical functionalism, patchy material chronologies and the obscuring of social dynamics. I argue that research on past human–environment relationships needs more attention to landscape time and smaller-scale practices, and advocate studying the political dimensions that structured how past communities created and managed liveable conditions in uneven ways.