Climate Change and Rural Livelihood in Calabria, Italy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding how human activity, climate systems, ecosystems, and earth surface processes interact to change the capacity for different human livelihoods over time is crucial to finding livable strategies for coping with the looming climate crisis. Community-engaged historical archaeology provides a lens for doing so across decades of time in the recent past, and illustrates the impact of these changes in local communities. In this poster, I draw on historical weather station data to compile a temporally contiguous dataset of daily climate records of the vicinity of Bova Superiore, Calabria, for the period of 1916–2022. I complement these weather records with a monthly spatial record of vegetation health for the period of 1981–2022 derived from AVHRR and MODIS satellite imagery and historical records and archaeological survey to create a timeline of climate, vegetation, and land-use change in the region over the past century. These data are used as input to landscape evolution simulation experiments to understand the impact of changing climate and vegetation on soil loss dynamics in the area over time in the context of local patterns of land-use, water management, and community infrastructure and to contemporaneous social and political changes happening in the greater region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38058.0