The Threat of Climate Change

Public Archaeology and Climate Change, 2017

Climate change projections for California indicate that even moderate changes in temperature and sea level will have dramatic effects on archaeological resources here. Coastal erosion, inundation, increased fire hazard, and site exposure due to reservoir drawdown threaten California's cultural heritage. Even now, changes in weather patterns and sea level rise have resulted in the destruction of once stable coastal sites. In the forests, severe drought, disease, and past land management policy has led to catastrophic fires. Looting exposed sites in reservoirs and lakes has drawn national attention. While much of the focus of climate change is on future impacts, climate-caused damage is happening now. The Society for California Archaeology has launched archaeological surveys of the state''s coastal margin. with over 3000 linear km(1900 miles) to look at and little funding, the study has been a massive mobilization of volunteers coordinated through a handful of dedicated professionals. Fundamental to the project is working closely with tribal communities, each of which has their own views on climate change, archaeology, and long-term land management practices. This paper summarises that effort, with the hope that the methods and goals expressed for this project can be used as a model nationwide and elsewhere around the world.

New Florida Journal of Anthropology, 2020

Hudson et al. (2012) provided five ways in which archaeology can contribute to developing responses to the global climate crisis. By using these five broader themes as a framework, we evaluate the role of Southeastern archaeology in the discussion of climate change but also highlight the reality for 15 archaeological and historical sites in terms of their struggle with the effects of climate change and the associated risk of losing physical remains of past human activity. To better visualize the effects of climate change on these 15 archaeological and historic sites, we created a triage system by placing each site into categories based on its current and near-future preservation condition. Introduction Scholars and scientists have long discussed the topic of climate change, but politicians and the public have increasingly debated plans on how to address it and mitigate its effects. 1 Effects of climate change can include rising temperatures and sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, erratic weather patterns , large-scale wildfires, floods, droughts, and more. These changes have devastating implications for our cultural resources as well as our economy, infrastructure, and wildlife. While archaeology can do little to reverse the current global climate crisis, it can be helpful in determining how our global society handles the consequences of climate change.

AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology, 2020

A book review examining the intersection of climate change studies, public archaeology projects and cultural heritage management strategies, demonstrating the scale of the issue we are facing, but also the strength of different public archaeology approaches. I recommend this book to anyone interested in public archaeology and heritage management.

Public Archaeology and Climate Change, 2017

Chapter 1. In Dawson, T., Nimura, C., López-Romero, E. & Daire, MY (ed.) Public Archaeology and Climate Change, Oxbow Books, Oxford.

Archaeological Dialogues

As we pass into an age of the Anthropocene, archaeologists, as scholars of other disciplines, are driven to consider how this physical and ideological climate change affects our craft, or how archaeology can contribute with knowledge and insight of significance in a shifting world. Basing its arguments on research conducted on marine debris and drift beaches in northern Norway and Iceland, the aim of this article is to imagine what kind of alternative ways of doing and thinking archaeology the current climate is calling for. With reference to this material, which conspicuously manifests both obstacles and promises for an ‘Anthropocene archaeology’, the article will question the worth of some perspectives traditionally considered essential to our discipline, while simultaneously building on confidence in a sincerely archaeological imagination.

Public Archaeology and Climate Change promotes new approaches to studying and managing sites threatened by climate change, specifically actions that engage communities or employ ‘citizen science’ initiatives. Researchers and heritage managers around the world are witnessing severe challenges and developing innovative mechanisms for dealing with them. Increasingly archaeologists are embracing practices learned from the natural heritage sector, which has long worked with the public in practical recording projects. By involving the public in projects and making data accessible, archaeologists are engaging society in the debate on threatened heritage and in wider discussions on climate change. Community involvement also underpins wider climate change adaptation strategies, and citizen science projects can help to influence and inform policy makers. Developing threats to heritage are being experienced around the world, and as this collection of papers will show, new partnerships and collaborations are crossing national boundaries. With examples from across the globe, this book brings together a selection of papers that detail the scale of the problem through a variety of case studies. Together they will demonstrate how heritage professionals, working in diverse environments and with distinctive archaeology, are engaging with the public to raise awareness of this threatened resource. The contributions in this volume will examine differing responses and proactive methodologies for the protection, preservation and recording of sites at risk from natural forces. It will demonstrate how new approaches can better engage people with the growing number of sites that are under increasing threat of destruction, thus contributing to the resilience of our shared heritage. The new insights using real-life examples presented in this volume will make it a key reference in the field of climate change and heritage studies.

Antiquity, 2011

Archaeology claims a long tradition, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century, of undertaking both palaeoclimate research and studies on the impact of past climate change on human communities (Trigger 1996: 130–38). Such research ought to be making a significant contribution to modern climate change debates, such as those led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); but in practice this rarely happens (e.g. McIntosh et al. 2000). This paper will attempt to conceptualise a ‘climate change archaeology’, which is defined here as the contribution of archaeological research to modern climate change debates (cf. Mitchell 2008). Irrespective of whether climate change poses the greatest challenge in the twenty-first century or whether it is just one of many challenges facing humanity (cf. Rowland 2010), the absence of an archaeological voice diminishes the relevance and impact of the debate as a whole. This paper will consider the current relationship between climate change research and archaeology, noting that an evidence base for the impacts of past climate change, and the responses of communities, is almost entirely missing from the agenda. An argument will then be made that archaeology is well placed to enhance the socio-ecological resilience of communities and their adaptive capacity to climate change through the study of past pathways to adaptation. Finally, the concepts of climate change archaeology and the contribution it can make to current debates will be illustrated in a case-study, focused on the North Sea.

PNAS, 2020

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. heritage | sustainability | governance | cultural evolution

Historical Archaeology, 2023

Recent studies have demonstrated that a significant number of cultural-heritage resources will soon be affected by rising sea levels and climatic disasters. However, efforts to model the impacts of climate change provide limited, if any, considerations of structural inequality that affects resource detection and communities in the past. This article explores the relationship among legacies of historical marginalization, cultural-heritage resources, and archaeological practice in the context of climate-change discourse. The effects of this erasure are not limited to the past, but have significant and lasting implications for descendant communities in the present.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

We live in an age characterized by increasing environmental, social, economic, and political uncertainty. Human societies face significant challenges, ranging from climate change to food security, biodiversity declines and extinction, and political instability. In response, scientists, policy makers, and the general public are seeking new interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches to evaluate and identify meaningful solutions to these global challenges. Underrecognized among these challenges is the disappearing record of past environmental change, which can be key to surviving the future. Historical sciences such as archaeology access the past to provide long-term perspectives on past human ecodynamics: the interaction between human social and cultural systems and climate and environment. Such studies shed light on how we arrived at the present day and help us search for sustainable trajectories toward the future. Here, we highlight contributions by archaeology—the study of t...