The effects of man-made climate change are devastating communities around the world, and climate scientists warn that such extreme events will worsen as the world warms. But can we use the lessons of the past to gather vital clues about our future? A team of anthropologists and earth scientists believes we can.
Led by University of Montreal anthropologist Ariane Burke, a team of archaeologists, geographers and scientists in Canada, the U.S. and France this week highlighted the significance of a relatively new discipline: the archaeology of climate change.
The discipline uses data from archaeological excavations and the climate record to work out how humans dealt with their environment in the past. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Burke and her fellow authors noted that, although environmental transformation is taking place at a pace never seen before, humans have overcome similar challenges in the past. Archaeology, they write “offers opportunities to identify the factors that promoted human resilience in the past and apply the knowledge gained to the present, contributing a much-needed, long-term perspective to climate research.”
Crucially, however, the discipline focuses not on biodiversity, but on cultural diversity.
Burke, who is scientific director of the Hominin Dispersals Research Group and the Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory at the University of Montreal, told me what this means.
“We talk a lot about how important biological diversity is, but we should also be mindful of how we, as a species, have adopted a wide variety of different strategies for living on this planet,” Burke said. “Global climate change doesn't affect everyone in the same way. The same global-scale event will have different impacts at regional and local scales. That means that the archaeology of climate change is a potentially rich source of information about how global-scale events can affect smaller regions and a source of strategies for dealing with climate change in the future.”
Examples of this, Burke said, can be found in certain traditional farming practices, which can offer valid alternatives to help make industrial farming more sustainable. One notable instance of this is the recent re-adoption of ancient crops such as quinoa, an Incan staple for some 5,000 years, which has “an extraordinary adaptability to different agro-ecological regions,” including arid environments.
Meanwhile, modern-day farmers in North America have reinstituted Native American multi-cropping agriculture techniques around the "three sisters" crops, namely corn, squash and beans, which, when planted together, form a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship. Our distant ancestors appreciated that “growing a diverse range of crops means that if climate conditions limit the growth of one crop type, they might actually favour another crop,” Burke noted.
And it’s not just in agriculture that archaeology can teach us about climate adaptation strategies. Indigenous, community-based ranger groups in Australia have shown how traditional fire management strategies can hugely reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires of the type currently devastating the western U.S. and Canada.
Elsewhere, archaeologists such as Jennifer Pournelle at the University of South Carolina have argued that catastrophic climate events such sea level rise in Mesopotamia could have been the catalyst for a complete reorganization of society, leading to large-scale irrigation works which enabled the birth of the first cities. Other studies have demonstrated the role of climate change in the collapse of some of the world’s great empires, such as the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia.
Archaeological evidence suggests climate change was at least partly responsible for the 15th century ... [+]
David Vetter
In a Q&A session coinciding with the release of the paper, Burke said the reason archaeology could prove so significant a tool in climate resilience is that it reveals a diversity of solutions to climate change.
“It is the variety of strategies that have worked in the past that is interesting, since it provides us with a range of possible solutions to the problems we are currently facing,” she explained. “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.”
Burke concluded that archaeology could offer humans something other than doom and gloom in the face of mounting climate crises.
“There is still hope,” she said. “People have been experimenting with solutions to climate change for millennia. Some of them faced conditions far worse than today but they survived and even flourished. We can look to the past for inspiration and for practical solutions to make informed decisions for the future.”
The paper “The archaeology of climate change: The case for cultural diversity” can be viewed here.
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