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

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.