Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interdisciplinary applications in environmental archaeology commonly use environmental records such as sea-level indicators, geochemistry, and geomorphological studies to interpret the human record. However, environmental studies rarely consider the archaeological record when modeling paleoclimate or reconstructing environmental histories. Yet, the archaeological record is rich with unique datasets that provide useful indicators of rates and magnitudes of environmental change. This poster session provides examples of the contributions of the archaeological record to larger questions of the environmental past and to modeling the environmental future, especially related to climate change impacts. Archaeological evidence sharpens the understanding of environmental response through scaled geographic and temporal studies of human migration events, settlement pattern shifts, site abandonment, and social reorientation. Archaeologists who can communicate this knowledge base in multidisciplinary contexts have the potential to shift the discussion so that cultural heritage becomes central to the scientific enterprise.

Other Keywords
Environment and Climate  • Geoarchaeology • Cultural Resources and Heritage Management • Education • Climate Change • Historic • arctic • descendent communities • Coastal and Island Archaeology  • Plastic Archaeology

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Delaware (State / Territory) • Georgia (State / Territory) • Mississippi (State / Territory) • Tennessee (State / Territory) • North Carolina (State / Territory) • Utah (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-5 of 5)

  • Documents (5)
Documents
  • Islands in the Stream: Fort Pulaski’s Shifting Shorelines and Rising Groundwater (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Seifert.

    This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Fort Pulaski’s Workers’ Village have uncovered evidence of how the fort’s builders adapted to their barrier island environment and coped with hurricanes. Past fort personnel had their own version of the National Park Service’s Resist-Accept-Direct Framework: resisting...

  • North Norwegian Heritage at Risk (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Vibeke Vandrup Martens.

    This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate is changing now at an even higher rate than expected in some of the worst-case climate scenarios, with increasing temperatures, changes in precipitation, decreasing permafrost, more frequent and severe storms, sea-level rise, reduction of sea ice, floods, avalanches, and...

  • Reciprocal Archaeology in the Time of Climate Change (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

    This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized that partnerships with practitioners from allied disciplines enrich our contributions and create many-layered interpretations of the sites and communities we study. Working in the context of climate change, collaborations between archaeologists and...

  • Recording Baselines: Getting Climate Change and Plastic Pollution Data into the Archaeological Record (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Wooten.

    This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological site records are a tool for recording not only a site’s cultural constituents—landscapes, features, artifacts, built environment components, etc.—but also a format for documenting any adverse impacts that have occurred to those resources. What if those site record forms...

  • Teaching and Learning Climate Change through Global Change Archaeology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey.

    This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate should be mainstream in education and be incorporated into all subjects because climate change is permeating. Many natural sciences are already centering climate literacy in coursework, but as the effects of climate change have become more visible and clearer, humanities,...