What ancient landscapes contribute to climate change

Abstract

Input and reevaluation are greatly needed from several sources to curtail and perhaps avoid the myriad of unintended consequences excited by the "Great Acceleration" in industry and technology initiated in the last two hundred years, the most damaging consequences now apparent with the density of greenhouse gases surrounding us. In rapidly deciding which planning assessments warrant our immediate attention, archaeology via economic anthropology has a prominent place at the table of projections and potential solutions. 1 To make this case, two complex socioenvironmental examples from the archaeological record are introduced, one emphasizing a subtropical location-the ancient Maya-and the other from a semiarid setting of the ancestral Puebloans. The climatically "wet" is juxtaposed with the "dry" to illustrate the variation in environments effecting our planetary futures and demonstrating the significance of assessing past periods of both reduced population numbers and technological advancements. They reveal a less opaque and complex set of adaptations exposing the underlying set of relationships between climate and society in attempting to project today's futures. Before presenting the case studies, the connectivity between economic anthropology, archaeology, and climate change requires a brief introduction. Economic anthropology, archaeology, and climateEconomic anthropology tends to emphasize the production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services in the context of information flows. Unlike traditional neoliberal economics, which frequently undervalue ecosystem services, it favors an evaluation of the natural environment in which humans harvest or exploit by way of measuring the rate and process of its raw availability, production or refinement, use or consumption, and disposal or recycled reintroduction (Coscieme et al. 2019; see also Costanza 1991). As archaeologists, our discipline is based on the recovery and interpretation of the material record from a studied landscape associated with human activities. Strongly influenced by economic anthropology, archaeology examines and interprets things, places, and their histories within and between groups. It uses the record of past communities to reconstruct and model societal lifeways on a landscape through time.Climate change has been evaluated by archaeologists for decades to best characterize the environment in which ancient groups were able to live for extended periods. Because of preservation issues and limitations associated with dating controls, increments of centennial time have been our usual means for monitoring changes to both landscapes