The distant past can offer important perspectives on contemporary and future social challenges, including environmental crises, a team led by two former Brown postdocs and including several CGA affiliates shows. Amanda Gaggioli and Sandy Hunter’s Vital Topics Forum: Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis was published this year in the journal American Anthropologist.
Their research emerged from a workshop series at Brown sponsored by the Program in Early Cultures (the predecessor of the Center for Global Antiquity), grew into a conference at the Joukowksy Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and has now resulted in a journal special issue.The papers consider how archaeology might address contemporary environmental concerns such as global warming, biodiversity loss, or habitat destruction. Such challenges are global in scope but express themselves distinctly in different times and places. Hence, this collection of papers considers a range of geographies and temporal periods. Papers in the collection consider how working in contemporary environmental circumstances—and often alongside the people most directly impacted—pushes archaeologists to refocus their research questions and approaches and propose ways archaeological findings can shape responses to environmental concerns in the present and future.
View of the Vasilikos River Valley in Kalavasos, Cyprus — a terraced landscape of valuable arable land with developments that may date back millennia. Photo: Amanda Gaggioli.
Preparing to plant at Ollantaytambo, Peru, on high altitude fields built by the Inka and carefully managed through the last five centuries. Photo: Sandy Hunter.