Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

Though infrequently used and largely superfluous, amphitheaters were often the most physically imposing and ideologically charged structures in a Roman city. The preponderance of extramural amphitheaters in Italy and their appearance in visual culture confirm they were potent markers of urban life and civic status. This paper contextualizes Tibur's imperial amphitheater within the Roman suburbium's persistent urban sprawl and villas, especially Hadrian's Villa, using a novel GIS visibility analysis. Its apparent size from various points in the surrounding landscape is quantified within empirical and qualitative scales developed for modern visual impact assessments. The results demonstrate the amphitheater's suburban location did more than integrate Tibur's extramural growth into the older urban center. It emphasized the city's urban appearance, even from long distances, and monumentalized alternate routes to the city used by the villa-owning elite, countering the ambiguous status of a liminal city that was both Rome's annex and an autonomous municipium.

Anthropologists have demonstrated that having information about new settlements is crucial for drawing migrants. Pilgrimage to ritual landscapes and their shrines allows people, including Maya societies, to explore places where they can settle. They then establish or augment settlements around the landscape shrines, which explains the locations and growth of some centers. Migrants continue to make pilgrimages to shrines, such as sacred mountains, near their receiving settlements to enhance community cohesion through ritual contact with spiritual forces. In this article, I show that pilgrimage is an important element in the establishment of select migrant settlements and their community identity. I focus on Maya and Mesoamerican cultures, particularly at Mensabak in Chiapas, Mexico, and on supporting archaeological, historical, and ethnographic information. I conclude that Maya perceptions of movement, connectivity, and transformation in their world are linked to pilgrimage, migration, and community formation. Importantly, pilgrimage provides a religious variable, in addition to better-known economic, political, or demographic factors, to consider in migration.

This research employs machine learning (Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks [Mask R-CNN]) and cluster analysis (Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise [DBSCAN]) to identify more than 20,000 relict charcoal hearths (RCHs) organized in large “fields” within and around State Game Lands (SGLs) in Pennsylvania. This research has two important threads that we hope will advance the archaeological study of landscapes. The first is the significant historical impact of charcoal production, a poorly understood industry of the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, on the historic and present landscape of the United States. Although this research focuses on charcoal production in Pennsylvania, it has broad application for both identifying and contextualizing historical charcoal production throughout the world and for better understanding modern charcoal production. The second thread is the use of open data, open source, and open access tools to conduct this analysis, as well as the open publication of the resultant data. Not only does this research demonstrate the significance of open access tools and data but the open publication of our code as well as our data allow others to replicate our work, to tweak our code and protocols for their own work, and reuse our results.

This article presents a geomorphological and micromorphological study of the locational context of four Indus civilisation archaeological sites—Alamgirpur, Masudpur I and VII, and Burj—all situated on the Sutlej-Yamuna interfluve in northwest India. The analysis indicates a strong correlation between settlement foundation and particular landscape positions on an extensive alluvial floodplain. Each of the analysed sites was located on sandy levees and/or riverbank deposits associated with former channels. These landscape positions would have situated settlements above the level of seasonal floodwater resulting from the Indian summer monsoon. In addition, the sandy soils on the margins of these elevated landscape positions would have been seasonally replenished with water, silt, clay, and fine organic matter, considerably enhancing their capacity for water retention and fertility and making them particularly suitable for agriculture. These former landscapes are obscured by recent modification and extensive agricultural practices. These geoarchaeological evaluations indicate that there is a hidden landscape context for each Indus settlement. This specific type of interaction between humans and their local context is an important aspect of Indus cultural adaptations to diverse, variable, and changing environments.

“Structural violence” is a term used to describe inflicted systematic violence on a disenfranchised group by an established order, usually framed as a government or the social majority. The disenfranchised groups are marginalized and not provided with the same access to resources such as healthcare or food, the effects of which can be observed directly in their death. Bioarchaeologists often can detect the visible effects of this violence on skeletal remains, which provide a visual representation to and reinforcement of social prejudices inflicted in life and death. Discussed here is how the same concept of structural violence can be inflicted on the landscape through damage to or obliteration of cemeteries. We propose a definition of “landscape structural violence” exhibited through cemetery erasure as a reinforcement of preexisting social prejudices in death where the governments or the social majority, intentionally or passively, destroy, remove, or obscure a cemetery without consultation with the descendant community. This definition is applied to several examples of New Orleans cemeteries to determine the functionality of the definition and what activity is and what is not structural violence inflicted on the landscape.

The use of Bt cotton varieties has greatly reduced the amount of conventional insecticides required to control lepidopteran pests, Helicoverpa armigera and Helicoverpa punctigera, in Australia, but the possibility that these moths might become resistant to Bt remains a threat. Consequently, a Resistance Management Plan, which includes the mandatory growing of refuge crops (pigeon pea and non-Bt cotton; both C3 plants), has been established for Bt cotton farmers. However, knowledge of the relative contributions made to overall moth populations from the many host origins (both C3 and C4 plants) available to these insects throughout cotton production regions remains limited, as do the scales of movement and spatial mixing of moths within and between these areas. This study used stable isotope signatures (in particular δ13C) to help identify where moths fed as larvae within separate cotton production regions which differed in their proportions of C3 and C4 host crops (e.g. cotton and sorghum, respectively). C3-derived moths predominated in the early season, but C4-derived moths increased in frequency later. The overall proportion of C4 moths was higher in H. armigera than in H. punctigera. Whilst the relative proportions of C3 and C4 moths differed between regions, no differences in such proportiorns were found at smaller spatial scales, nor were there significant correlations between crop composition and isotope signatures in moths. Overall, these results suggest that C4 host plants are likely to be very important in offsetting the development of Bt resistance in these insects and such influences may operate across multiple regions within a single growing season.

John Lee's, David Fedman's, and Lisa Brady's essays persuasively show the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. Each of the essays carefully explains how drives led by individuals and entities, such as the state, engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth. In so doing, they show how these drives simultaneously altered nature and remade institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people's agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness. By judiciously making visible the agents and social forces behind the reconstitution of nature, the essays collectively introduce diverse approaches to the study of environmental issues in Asia and elsewhere. Most of all, they demonstrate that transnational environmental history on the Korean peninsula can no longer be overlooked when dwelling on and debating major historical and theoretical issues in Korean, Asian, and environmental studies.

Excavations at the Middle Pleistocene site of La Cotte de St Brelade, on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, have revealed a long sequence of occupation. The continued use of the site by Neanderthals throughout an extended period of changing climate and environment reveals how, despite changes in the types of behaviour recorded at the site, La Cotte emerged as a persistent place in the memory and landscape of its early hominin inhabitants. The site's status as a persistent place for these people suggests a level of social and cognitive development permitting reference to and knowledge of places distant in time and space as long ago as at least MIS 7.

Traditional studies of early bronze metallurgy in China have focused on typology, decoration and production methods. The application of new analytical techniques to investigate chemical composition, however, is offering important new insights. The use of one such method (electron probe microanalysis) to study bronze artefacts from the Hanzhong basin in central China shows a level of diversity that implies much greater complexity in the extended landscape networks of the Bronze Age than was previously thought. The ability to appreciate these finds from a new perspective allows progression beyond older, simplistic models, and demonstrates that the Hanzhong region held greater importance within the power structure of Bronze Age Central China than has previously been recognised.