Climate Change Has a History and Landscape Learning Is One of Its Storytellers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Development of the landscape learning model began more than 20 years ago as part of my work to find ways to use the past to help address modern environmental problems. Combining initial work with nineteenth-century gold rush miners in Wyoming with models of Paleoindian colonization and assemblages led to the hypothesis that all people encountering unfamiliar environments are challenged to learn them and that how they do so can, in at least some cases, be seen and studied archaeologically. Since then, landscape learning has been tested and further developed across a range of times and places—together showing that landscape learning is a path to equity, in that every place that is or has been a home to people has held pathways of environmental learning, and that modern anthropogenic climate change is both shaped by landscape learning in the past and is and will continue to demand more learning from us as we identify climate impacts and face climate adaptation, migration, and mitigation. Drawing particularly from the history and archaeology of the historical settlement of Jamestown, this paper brings together the past and future of the archaeology of landscape learning with climate change science and policy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36536.0