Revisioning the plant-human interaction in Iran. From microscope to relational practices: The case of Juglans Regia L.

The human-environment relationship is an important tenet of archaeological science and a primary goal for understanding the cultural landscape in antiquity. However, this article develops some aspects concerning environmental history as sub-discipline of the Environmental Humanities which have grown in response to climatic challenges. 1 Under this methodological “umbrella,” environmental history, a well-established discipline in the social sciences and humanities traditionally exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world, is instead conceived as a research field which intends to overcome the conceptual division between human and nonhuman, society and environment, culture and nature. 2 As part of this diverse perspective, the environmental history emphasises the distance from the notion of an extra-social nature, and the idea of wilderness as culturally meaningful and revelatory of power relationships, rather than as only biophysical fact. 3 It is a relational view of the world where organisms, elements and forces are considered as a unity, where human and nonhuman actors are visible and knowable through material, social and symbolic relationships: human meanings arise from these relationships, both shaping and being shaped by them. Within a specific bio-political context, rather than develop themes such as environment reconstruction or food procurement processes in terms of a culture-nature dichotomy, research must demonstrate that the “natural” is actually “cultural.” This goal does not require a radical shift in terms of methodology and research tools, but rather a reconsideration of our approaches in order to give voice to “silent” actors. While it is important to work with scientific data (climatic, archaeobotanical, archaeological and textual sources), these datasets should be considered as “material-semiotic nodes” according to O’Gorman and Gaynor, 4 remnants of the complex histories of human-plant encounters (including narratives and cultural practices) as well as multiple and overlapping systems of knowledge.