| Summary: | <p>Human-environment relations are a point of interest in the archaeology of indigenous southern Central America, defined here to encompass Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. As such, it does not deviate from other world regions. This focus in past and contemporary research reflects the weight given to the idea of natural surroundings as resource endowments, following the cultural ecology approach. Elsewhere, such emphases on material, and indeed economic, sides of human interactions with their surroundings were met with criticism in social and human geography and later also in archaeology, leading up to the manifold contributions by what came to be known as landscape archaeology or the interest in relations between people and place.</p> <br/> <p>This paper examines the status of such conceptual rethinking for the regional archaeology of southern Central America. Certainly the geography of this part of the world offers a particular set of conditions, marked by widespread volcanism in a unique continental isthmian setting with significant tectonic activity. Alongside regional trajectories of cultural development demonstrating remarkable stability, it seems feasible to develop particular regional notions on the natural surroundings. But which concepts are mobilized in analyses of the archaeological record in this region?</p>
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