How Climate Change Archaeology Can Help Adaptation Challenges

Could lessons in the past help us fight our present adversary – climate change?

A group of earth scientists and anthropologists believed it could, through new science, the archaeology of climate change.

This new discipline will allow us to see how humans coped with their environments in the past through archaeological excavations and climate records, which will inform our adaptation and dealing with our present battle with climate change.

The study, “The archaeology of climate change: The case for cultural diversity,” examines the factors that promoted human resilience in the past. This knowledge offers a long-term perspective and a much-needed perspective to climate research.

Archaeology focuses on adapting to climate change through cultural diversity, as shown in past examples, rather than from biodiversity alone.

Discourse on climate change mainly revolves around Western and industrialized societies despite the evidence pointing to non-industrialized communities as those that will bear the brunt of climate change.

Furthermore, focusing on cultural diversity offers an alternative solution to those provided by the Western agro-industrial complex.

The study says that the efforts to curb global warming are insufficient, and trends for the worldwide rise in temperatures will likely reach + 4.8°C, and as much as +8°C in the Arctic by the end of the century.

The ecological changes that will occur due to this warming will be alarming. They will require us to plan for a sustainable response to climate change and identify critical climate thresholds capable of disrupting social, economic, political, and culturally efficient strategies to cope with its consequences.

Climate change is also transforming landscapes and will continue to accelerate well into the future. Changes in the landscapes will disproportionately affect indigenous communities and small-scale subsistence farmers who rely heavily on their relationships with the land for their food, livelihood, and culture.

Adriane Burke, the study’s lead author, says that we place a lot of emphasis on biological diversity. Still, we should also consider the wide variety of strategies humans have implemented for living on this planet.

Burke adds that global climate change doesn’t affect everyone in the same way but will have different regional and local impacts.

Traditional farming practices show how people coped with environmental changes, offering lessons for making industrial farming more sustainable. 

Examples are taken from the ancient Incan farming of quinoa, a crop known for its extraordinary ecological adaptability and a staple food for 5000 years. Another is the reinstituting of Native American multi-cropping agriculture techniques.

The most famous of these is the “three sisters” crops of corn, squash, and beans, which, when planted together, form a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship.

Cultural diversity is displayed not only through farming but also in fire management. Indigenous fire management practices in Australia have shown how they can reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Those that happened last year in the country are currently happening in the western US and Canada.

Developments in climate modelling have led to the increased availability of paleoclimate information, allowing archaeologists to study and understand past human-environmental interactions and movements.

According to Burke, “Climate modellers also use the past as a ‘testing ground’ where they can try their hand at modelling climate systems far different from today’s, such as the rapid warming that occurred between 14,700 and 12,700 years ago. Doing so helps them model possible outcomes of climate change in the future. ”

Jennifer Pournell of the University of South Carolina said that through archaeological data, we can see how catastrophic events in the past, like a sea-level rise, have reorganized a Mesopotamian society and the collapse of a Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia (Vetter, 2021).

According to the study’s authors, the environmental challenges that we are experiencing right now and the speed at which they are happening have also happened in the past. Humans have dealt with them successfully.

They presented that archaeology can help us examine their past experiences and learn the factors that promoted their resilience, providing us with a range of possible solutions to the problems that we face today.

To read the entire study, click the link below: