Abstract

Pervading the world of environmental conservation at this time is promotion of a new land ethic. This is the ecocentric ethic, which rejects the western economic tenet that nature exists exclusively for our use and abuse and that economic growth is more important than environmental integrity. The ecocentric ethic places a higher value on the environment and its protection than it does on humanity, which is considered to be no more than part of that environment. Many environmentalists believe that general acceptance of the ecocentric ethic will lead to greatly improved human-environment relationships in the future, saving the environment, biodiversity, and humanity from extinction caused by our nature exploitation excesses. Recent studies show that indeed there is a new environment ethic developing in technological societies, but it is only a partial shift toward the ecocentric ethic, retaining a good measure of the old anthropocentrism. Concomitant with and related to the ethical shift is development of the landscape ecosystem approach in environmental or land management. Basic to this approach is the intent to maintain landscape integrity, thereby ensuring that ecosystem processes remain intact. Archaeological information is part of the landscape ecosystem, part of past anthroposystems within ecosystems. The landscape archaeology related to this more general environmental management approach incorporates both the academic or explanatory and resource management sides of archaeology. The academic side concentrates on how past humans related to their environments, including their own perceptions of this. Explanatory hypotheses may include the relationships of material cultural distributions to physical and biological landscapes, demographics, and finding punctuated material cultural change and stasis intervals in the archaeological record. The resource management side is beginning to focus less on salvage of information from developments perceived as inevitable, and more on being part of overall landscape planning and management to ensure retention of landscape integrity, thereby hopefully obviating the need for most salvage operations. This management approach includes input from relevant traditional and local peoples at the decision-making level.