Tingens och tankarnas landskap : försök i naturumgängets arkeologi med exempel ur Blekinges och Smålands förflutna

The thesis "Tingens och tankarnas landskap" is about the material traces of man and his activities in the past. The study investigates the possibility and methods of describing man’s interaction with nature. Man’s relationship to the physical surroundings is viewed from cultural and social perspectives, using the materials of long-term archaeology. The study also includes a contemporary dimension. The following three issues are considered: 1. What can be included in a long-term archaeological epistemology of human ecology? 2. What can long-term archaeology, using material traces, tell us about the man’s interaction with nature in the past? 3. What can long-term archaeology contribute to the contemporary debate about environmental issues? The thesis attempts to find archaeological methods and theories to provide a humanistic approach to the study of man’s interaction with nature. In this thesis, “archaeological” refers to the material traces in the landscape, major and minor, natural and man-made. It primarily studies inorganic evidence of the interaction between man and nature. This means that Quaternary Biological studies play only a minor role. The study is characterised by an ecological perspective that can be described as symbolic, social, and materiality-based. The approach is humanistic. Consequently, one challenge is to extend knowledge and provide inspiration in the humanities and the arts, rather than in the natural sciences. The study is primarily based on traces of the Stone Age in the present-day counties of Blekinge and Småland in southeast Sweden. However, one of the case studies adopts an ethnohistorical perspective to focus on the materiality and man’s interactions with nature in two late historical and modern Swedish fishing economies