LandCover6K: Using Archaeology to Improve Climate Models

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

LandCover6k is an international and interdisciplinary working group dedicated to reconstructing human land use across the Holocene. The goal of this initiative is to critically evaluate and improve models of anthropogenic land cover change used in climate science and historical modeling, work that is urgently needed. Current climate models make little use of the vast repository of evidence about human history, despite an awareness that humans are one agent of global change. Vegetation is known to change in response to many factors, including human land use, but the complex and variable relationships between land use and land cover are still insufficiently understood. Differing assumptions about these relationships have led to significant differences between models of anthropogenic land cover change, a shortcoming with immediate scientific and policy implications for work on global climate. Global climate models thus make use of quite problematic assessments about the subject matter of archaeology and history. In this session, we outline the goals and procedures of LandCover6k and report on preliminary work classifying, compiling, and mapping land use data from several world regions. Archaeology turns out to be a critical discipline for understanding not only the past, but also the present and future.