Archaeologists, Climate Change, and You

Summary

This is an abstract from the "United States Archaeology at Crossroads Part 1: The Obstacles, the Failures, and the Victories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Climate change is an umbrella that encompasses a variety of interrelated environment and social impacts such as sea level rise, increased temperatures, changing weather patterns, forest fires, drought, famine, migration, and conflict. Increasingly governments are trying to figure ways to address it. The Biden administration has taken a front-row seat in addressing change through climate initiatives, agency policies, and the NEPA process. Archaeologists are in a unique position to contribute to addressing climate change with respect to threats from and potential solutions to impacts of climate change. Archaeologists has long been interested in the interplay between environmental change and the human condition, in the human response, both culturally and technologically, to environmental/climate change. Today, that interest extends to the impact of climate change to modern society. Increasingly, archaeologists are examining the technological responses of past cultures to battle climate change. This paper examines the lessons that archaeology can teach us about possible technological responses to what we are facing and argues that archaeologists need to be at the table in international and governmental discussions of climate change but it will not be easy gaining that seat; archaeologists will have to fight for it and there are ways to do that.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• United States Archaeology at Crossroads Part 1: The Obstacles, the Failures, and the Victories

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52261