Urban Ecology in the Ancient Tropics : Foodways and Urban Forms

With roots tracing back to the nineteenth century and the study of ‘natural’ ecosystems, in the 1970s urban ecology emerged as a sub-discipline integrating the natural, engineering, social, and humanist sciences (McDonnell 2011). Adding to the primary scope of urban ecology focusing on the recent past, the present, and planning for the future (e.g. Forman 2016), archaeologists use a deep temporal frame of reference for analyzing socio-ecological processes in urban systems (e.g. Redman 2011). Typically employing an anthropocentric perspective on these interactions and combining data from disparate and complementary sources, archaeologists study what people have done, explain why they did so (by testing and evaluating a multitude of social, economic, cultural, and/or ecological interpretive frameworks), and link outcomes to specific legacies, consequences, and trade-offs of anthropogenic transformations of landscape (Isendahl and Stump 2019). Archaeology can extend the frame of reference and spatial and temporal scale of analysis for urban ecology scholars and planners addressing the wide range of issues and challenges presently associated with cities and urban systems (Isendahl and Barthel 2018).