This book offers an in-depth exploration of the interplay between resources and societies, bridging insights from the humanities and natural sciences. Drawing on a robust theoretical framework, it extends the conventional understanding of resources to include their socio-cultural constructions across diverse temporal and spatial contexts. Through a series of compelling case studies ranging from prehistory to the present, the book explores material and immaterial resources, the infrastructures and networks in which they are embedded, and the complex dynamics of their use. It draws on the concepts of ResourceComplexes and ResourceAssemblages and provides innovative tools for analysing these interdependencies. By framing resources as cultural phenomena, this work unravels the multifaceted ways in which societies have been shaped by and have reshaped their resource landscapes - culminating in the notion of ResourceCultures.
The final publication of the CRC 1070 ResourceCultures offers interdisciplinary insights into the questions of how resources are created, how resources are utilised, how resources are influenced by social processes and how resources in turn affect societies. Using concrete case studies from spatially and chronologically different contexts, these dynamics and processes of resource becoming and utilisation are discussed in an exemplary and application-oriented manner.
