Other Archaeologies of the Present: Enduring Legacies of Past Land Use

Summary

Some scholars take the label 'archaeology of the present' to refer to the study of very recent archaeological records and material remains, but here I use it to refer to the ways in which even ancient human action has ongoing significance for the present and the future. One of the many arenas of the contemporary significance of the 'archaeological' past is the legacy of past land use, including that of irrigated agriculture, on regional and global vegetation, landforms, and even climate. I discuss a new working group, Landcover 6k, designed to study how land use and land cover (vegetation) changes throughout the Holocene have been linked and how these changes have had an impact on regional and global climate.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Contributions of Vernon Scarborough in Water Management and Sustainability, Part 1: Global and Comparative

Keywords

Spatial Coverage