Expanding use of archaeology in climate change response by changing its social environment

Abstract

Climate science has outlined targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions necessary to provide a substantial chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change on both natural and human systems. How to reach those targets, however, requires balancing physical realities of the natural environment with the complexity of the human social environment, including histories, cultures, and values. Archaeology is the study of interactions of natural and social environments through time and across space. As well, the field of cultural resources management, which includes archaeology, regularly engages with values such as site significance and allocation of funding that the modern social environment ascribes to its own history. Through these two approaches, archaeology has potential to provide both data for and methods of addressing challenges the global community faces through climate change. To date, however, archaeology and related areas of cultural heritage have had relatively little role in the global climate response. Here, we assess the social environment of archaeology and climate change and resulting structural barriers that have limited use of archaeology in and for climate change with a case study of the US federal government. On this basis, we provide recommendations to the fields of archaeology and climate response about how to more fully realize the multiple potential uses of archaeology for the challenges of climate change.

To understand how migrations affect human securities, look to the past

“…The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, has long recognized that past societies provide cases of adaptive and maladaptive responses to climate change that are instructive to our present dilemma. Nonetheless, archaeology is generally lacking in IPCC reports and absent in the crafting of public policy (18). To some, this is evidence that the problems of today are not like those faced in the past.…”

The IPCC: A Primer for Archaeologists

“…Despite many exciting results emanating from this work, as of yet it seems to have had little impact on actual public policy discussions. Rockman and Hritz (2020) explore some of the factors underlying this frustration. In the United States, for example, heritage is effectively invisible at the level of federal engagement with climate change.…”

“…The writing and structure of the U.S. National Climate Assessments have followed similar alignments. Rockman and Hritz (2020) argue that this has created a feedback loop such that as visible federal practice does not engage substantively with management or information aspects of archaeology and other forms of heritage with respect to climate change, it is acceptable and standard for subsequent reports and initiatives not to engage with archaeology or heritage either. Given these gaps, it becomes more difficult to demonstrate the utility of archaeology, because practitioners and scientists outside of archaeology have not substantively engaged with applications of archaeology to climate issues.…”

Archaeology, climate, and global change in the Age of Humans

“…A key step forward in the coming years is to use these interdisciplinary archaeological examples to engage policy makers, other scientists, and the public. Archaeological involvement in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other national and international groups remains relatively limited, but is growing (30). A key direction is continued collaboration across disciplines, fostering open dialogue and recognition that the human past provides a roadmap for how we got to the present and signposts for where we would like to go in the future.…”

“…Collectively, these and other studies demonstrate that archaeological sites represent a series of observation networks about changing environmental conditions and human activities through time (Distributed Long-term Observing Networks of the Past), with much potential to address modern environmental challenges (24). This PNAS special feature brings together six globally distributed papers that demonstrate the value of archaeology within transdisciplinary research programs focused on integrating perspectives on past, present, and future climate change and related environmental challenges (25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). These papers demonstrate cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on archaeology, climate change, and other global environmental challenges, emphasizing how archaeology provides information of value to science and society in an era of global change, while, at the same time, sounding warning bells about the ongoing destruction of this critical record ( Fig.…”