Multiple Ways of Understanding Peru’s Changing Climate: Bridging Ethnographic, Archaeological, and Other Scientific Perspectives in Student Learning

Summary

This paper discusses the importance of combining ethnographic, archaeological, and "hard" scientific knowledge when teaching about climate change. Archaeology courses that discuss climate change typically bring together data from the physical sciences, such as from ice or lake cores, with archaeological evidence of social change, such as shifting settlement patterns or food strategies. Though an understanding of these links is critical to scientific literacy and knowledge about the past, we suggest that an ethnographic perspective can deeply enrich student learning by revealing social processes beyond subsistence-based adaptations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural communities in Peru, we first review how local people perceive the causes and effects of climate change, including through the lens of religious belief. Second, we draw on archaeological and available ice core evidence from the region that reveal how ancient people adapted to shifting flows of water: an ongoing process that continues today. Ultimately, we suggest that the diverse kinds of knowledge that ethnography, archaeology, and paleoclimatology produce—and the multiple ways of knowing the world that each provides—is essential for students to consider when learning about not only what happened during moments of climate change in the past, but how societies creatively responded.

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): 21525