Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the
scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in
advance is required. In focusing on laboring by humans and other
animals, the papers in this volume investigate through a wide range of
contexts how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while
remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods.
Each paper investigates the resource requirements of combined
activities, from conducting agriculture or trade, over many different
crafts, constructing houses and monumental buildings, and how the
available resources were employed successfully. Multilayered data sets
are employed to illuminate the many interconnected networks of humans
and resources that impacted on people's day-to-day activities, but also
to discuss the economic, cultural and socio-political relationships over
time in different regions.
Each of us aimed to discuss novel perspectives in which the landscape in
its widest sense is connected to interdisciplinary architectural and/or
crafting perspectives. Rural landscapes and their populace formed the
backbone of pre-industrial societies. Analyses of the rural
'hinterland', the foci of cities and other central places (often with
monumental architecture) and the communication between these are
essential for the papers of this volume. These different agents and
phenomena and their connections are crucial to our understanding how
political units functioned at several socially interconnected levels.
Bottom-up approaches can dissolve "monolithic" understandings of
societies, the elite-labor/farmer and the center/rural dichotomies,
because the many social groups co-depended on each other, albeit perhaps
in unequal measure depending on the given context.
