Archaeologists can contribute to the climate change debate
All the things we associate with our civilization, such as agriculture, living in cities, and the technology to make it all work were made possible by a long period of more or less mild and stable climate that began around 10,000 years ago.
Ironically, that civilization is now on the brink of disrupting the climate in ways that have the potential to end to civilization as we know it.
Since the Industrial Revolution, our profligate burning of fossil fuels has pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the world has become hotter than it’s been in more than 125,000 years. And in spite of the compromises reached in last month’s UN Climate Convention in Glasgow, it’s going to get even hotter.
Back in 2008, Peter Mitchell, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, argued in the journal Antiquity that archaeologists’ “privileged position to understand and make sense of the impact of climate change on human populations” confers on them the responsibility to contribute to the academic and political debates over what’s happening to the climate and what we can do about it. He believes that “archaeologists have a crucial role to play because of the great public interest in their work, its findings, and its presentation in museums and via the mass media.”
Mitchell suggests that one way archaeologists can contribute is by offering some measure of hope for the future based on how humans have faced similar challenges in the past – “for the archaeological record testifies too to the ability of human societies to respond creatively and successfully to episodes of climatic or environmental stress.”
For example, the changes in climate that marked the shift from the Ice Age to the warm and stable climate we’ve been enjoying for the past 10,000 years “were extraordinarily rapid, requiring human societies … to adapt on time spans measured in decades rather than centuries.”
This lesson from the past may help politicians and the general public grasp the consequences for us if, by doing too little to reduce our production of greenhouse gases, we are faced with similarly profound and rapid climate change.
In an upcoming issue of Antiquity, a team of archaeologists led by R.J. Sinensky at UCLA, explores the responses of the Ancestral Puebloan people of the American Southwest to “the coldest decade across the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2500 years.”
This catastrophic episode of climate change, caused by a series of massive volcanic eruptions in AD 536 and 541, first in the Pacific Northwest and later in El Salvador, “tore apart the social fabric” of the small-scale farming groups living in the region. The Indigenous people responded by totally reorganizing their societies around larger settlements with large, communal buildings to help foster a shared set of beliefs.
These reorganized societies went on to create the network of monumental Great Houses in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Examples of how ancient cultures successfully responded to episodes of climate change can, indeed, offer us a measure of hope. But while hope is essential, it’s not enough. Like the Ancestral Puebloans, we need to make fundamental changes in our society if we are to survive our climate crisis.
Brad Lepper is the Senior Archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage Program
Examples of how ancient cultures successfully responded to episodes of climate change can, indeed, offer us a measure of hope.