Historical Archaeology of Capitalism and Climate Change

Summary

Much of the climate change literature focuses on whether it is an empirically verifiable process or how individual’s behavior can ameliorate the impacts. Our common approach abstracts the environment, economy, society, and individuals as external relations that posit the cause and effects of global warming as categorically separate from endemic global poverty, starvation, and income disparities. Instead, we argue that discussions need to bring together all the social and natural aspects that people tend to abstract as separate; to see capitalism as an internally related dynamic totality. The unforeseen consequences of an ever-expanding economy built on the accumulation of wealth is that one of its "products" is the concentration of toxic gases that have contributed to global climate change. Historical archaeology provides a powerful set of vantage points from which to critically examine the history of capitalism in motion and case studies that can help people understand that climate change is both an internal and necessary to the laws of capitalist motion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21020