Does environmental archaeology need an ethical promise?

Abstract

Environmental catastrophes represent profound challenges faced by societies today. Numerous scholars in the climate sciences and the humanities have argued for a greater ethical engagement with these pressing issues. At the same time, several disciplines concerned with hazards are moving towards formalized ethical codes or promises that not only guide the dissemination of data but oblige scientists to relate to fundamentally political issues. This article couples a survey of the recent environmental ethics literature with two case studies of how past natural hazards have affected vulnerable societies in Europe's prehistory. We ask whether cases of past calamities and their societal effects should play a greater role in public debates and whether archaeologists working with past environmental hazards should be more outspoken in their ethical considerations. We offer no firm answers, but suggest that archaeologists engage with debates in human-environment relations at this interface between politics, public affairs and science. We are living in a climate of fear about our future climate. The language of the public discourse around global warming routinely uses a repertoire which includes words such as 'catastrophe', 'terror', 'danger', 'extinction' and 'collapse'. To help make sense of this phenomenon the story of the complex relationships between climates and cultures in different times and in different places is in urgent need of telling. If we can understand from the past something of this complex interweaving of our ideas of climate with their physical and cultural settings we may be better placed to prepare for different configurations of this relationship in the future. Mike Hulme (2008, 5)

Environmental determinism and archaeology. Understanding and evaluating determinism in research design

“…Along with Arponen and colleagues, I do not reject the notion that archaeology is conducted in the present and responds to personal, social and political concerns. To the contrary, I am very much concerned with the ethical dilemmas posed precisely by conducting research on the causal connections between past environmental change and human responses (Riede, Andersen and Price 2016;. Archaeology is an accommodating discipline and there are many ways in which to generate new knowledge of the past and just as many ways to make this knowledge do good work in the present.…”

The Dark Geocultural Heritage of Volcanoes: Combining Cultural and Geoheritage Perspectives for Mutual Benefit

“…Furthermore, the statistics available for many countries indicate that museums of cultural history are among the major attractions for tourists and locals alike (http://www.egmus.eu/). Museums are increasingly active in relation to questions of sustainability, biodiversity and climate change (Cameron and Neilson 2015; Rees 2017), although museums of cultural history have not yet fully grasped that opportunity (Jackson et al 2017;Jackson et al 2018), despite the fact that the entanglement of our knowledge about past environmental change and hazards in relation to cultural history can be said to afford not only learning opportunities (Riede et al 2016b) but also certain ethical obligations (Riede et al 2016a). Aligning geoheritage more closely with cultural heritage would open this remarkable public interface to the concerns of geoconservation, sustainability and boost risk and natural hazard awareness-the latter of which are still rather divorced from risk, vulnerability and society.…”

From Rackham to REVEALS: Reflections on Palaeoecological Approaches to Woodland and Trees

“…Palaeoecology has a role to play here, not least in terms of critiquing ideas of 'primeval woodland,' 'unspoiled nature' or 'rural idylls,' but there are other ways in which the discipline is relevant to contemporary issues, including those that can be described as essentially political (e.g. Riede, Andersen, and Price 2016). Given the possible scale of ecological problems associated with the Anthropocene (Waters et al 2016), the growing 'nature awareness' within popular culture, and the increasing pressures and potential of interdisciplinary research, it could be argued that active engagement in public and political arenas might be instructive to wider debates (Gearey and Richer n.d.) but also critical for the growth of a discipline that has traditionally regarded such issues as largely outside its aims or purpose.…”