ABSTRACT
We often think of the built environment as a phenomenon that people impose on the natural world. This perspective is rooted in the notion that there is a fundamental dichotomy between people and nature. As Ingold (2000) points out, this is usually not concordant with the ontology of the Native societies of the Americas. In contrast, such ontologies view humans and their actions as part of the world, rather than as distinct or separate. How do we understand the creation of the built environment in a manner that does not categorically rely upon viewing such features as separate from the “natural” world? We advocate an approach that considers a multi-scalar consideration of both time and acts of creation (see Bailey 2007). In addition, we also suggest, following Ingold (2000, 2012), that such analyses situate these acts within the context of individuals dwelling in a broader landscape. Here, we define landscape as the various actions that are “collapsed into an array of features that must be understood as possessing different temporalities” that are “rooted in the movements of social life” (Ingold 1993: 162; Pluckhahn et al. 2015b: 20). By taking such a view, we rely on notions of structure, agency, and history (sensu Pauketat 2001a, 2001b) and a recursive view of the world, which includes anthropogenic constructions as a part of the world and not distinct from it (see Thompson 2014 for a discussion of these points).
