‘Wildland–Urban Interfaces’ from an Archaeological Perspective

The ‘wildland-urban interface’ (WUI) has emerged as a critical focal point of wildfire threats, human-environmental conflicts, habitat loss and fragmentation, and zoonotic disease spread in the twenty-first century. Urban interfaces with their environments are not a novel phenomenon, however. From the Middle to Late Holocene, diverse urban configurations and networks interacted with ecosystem dynamics, land cover, fire regimes, biodiversity, and microbes across different regions of the globe. These interactions were followed by significant further transformations triggered by the spread of European colonial and industrial urban models. Despite the potential of focus on the WUI to reveal historical urban-environment dynamics, research into this topic in archaeology remains extremely limited. While problematizing its focus on ‘wild’-lands, we argue that studying the WUI provides a further opportunity to move beyond rigid definitions of cities versus hinterlands. Moreover, embracing interdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical advancements, research into historical WUIs enables us to focus on how different urban dynamics and processes in the past have fluidly interacted with risk and environmental change in the world around them on a variety of spatial and temporal scales, as well as the ways in which they have left legacies across contemporary landscapes.