Climate Change and Archaeological Research: An Analysis of NSF-Funded Archaeological Research Projects

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As the current climate crisis intensifies, requests for proposals of grant funding related to solutions addressing these issues have increased. For over a decade, there has been a push to integrate archaeology into conversations about climate change (Van de Noort 2011). In this poster, I analyze how archaeologists engage with questions related to climate change to determine the various ways in which archaeological research is applied to climate change. The corpus consists of abstracts from grants funded in the last ten years by the Archaeology and Archaeometry Program at the National Science Foundation. I examine the frequency of climate change in funded abstract and then code the abstracts for key terms and phrases used to connect archaeological data to modern climate change. Main themes focus on what data methods are used, whether these topics are presented as part of intellectual merit or broader impacts, and the framing in which these topics are discussed (e.g., adaptation, vulnerability, resilience). Patterns within these abstracts determine regional or sub-field-specific connections about how climate change is addressed. This research provides an initial exploration of how archaeologists engage with questions about climate change, which can be further expanded to include other funding agencies and interdisciplinary-focused programs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41493.0