Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last 30 years, archaeologists in North America have been increasingly attuned to the complex connections between Indigenous peoples and their environments. Shifting away from deterministic thinking, this environmentally conscious archaeology has explored how people and their environment are co-constituting while deteriorating the nature-culture dichotomy. Landscapes, waterscapes, and climate are all actants in historical processes, variably contributing to culture change and the decisions employed by ancient communities. Environmental actors have important social, political, and cosmological significance in Indigenous histories. In the current era, archaeologists are oriented toward novel methodologies and anthropological frameworks which permit investigations of the cultural factors entangled in the interactions between humans and both the environment and changing paleolandscapes through time. This session brings together scholars from across the discipline to consider new ways of thinking and expand narratives of the Native deep history of the continent. Participants build on a variety of theoretical corpuses, cross-disciplinary methods, and re-framed historical narratives to develop a compelling environmental anthropology of antiquity. Our aim is to articulate anthropological approaches and new possibilities in environmental archaeology.