Are Archaeologists Welcome in the Anthropocene?

As I'm sure most readers are aware, the "Anthropocene" is a term for our current geological/environmental epoch on earth. It was coined to reflect the fact that today and in the (geologically) recent past, humans have had an enormous impact on the earth as a geological and biological entity. There is by now a big literature on the anthropocene (see the bib below for some examples), and even a journal with that title.

It has been proposed that the anthropocene should be accepted as a formal name for the current geological epoch, and a study committee (the "Anthropocene Working Group") is now addressing this question for the Stratigraphy Comission of the Geological Society of London. (Wow, I wish archaeology had such a committee to sort out the varied meanings of messy period names such as Late Postclassic vs. Middle Postclassic vs. Early Aztec. I never know when to use those sequences of period names. I'd be happy to serve as the arbiter of truth, but my colleagues might not be so pleased).

Most of those concerned with geological periods and with the environmental trajectory of humans on earth seem to agree that anthropocene is a reasonable concept. But they are not in agreement about dating the origins of the anthropocene. As outlined in the very useful paper by Bruce Smith and Melinda Zeder (2014) in the journal Anthropocene, there are four main contenders for that date:

• AD 1800. This "late chronology" posits the industrial revolution as the major force that amplified human impacts on the earth. The anthropocene should therefore begin only in 1750 to 1800. This is currently the majority opinion among the (non-archaeological) scientists involved.
• 2,000 BP. This date comes from analyses suggesting major creation of anthropogenic soils around this time. This is probably the minority viewpoint.
• 8,000-5,000 BP. This date derives from evidence for major methane production from agriculture and human population growth, and it corresponds roughly to the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions (to use Childe's terms).
• ca.13,800 BP. This "early chronology" posits the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, with human impacts on megafauna, and other flora and fauna, as the most relevant time for considering the start of the anthropocene. In the words of Smith and Zeder, "it seems more useful to begin the Anthropocene when there is clear evidence on a global scale for human societies first developing the tools, in this case domestication, that will be employed in reshaping the earth's terrestrial ecosystems over a span of the next 10,000 years." They note that the Anthropocene would then be coterminous with the Holocene, requiring only a name change, not the creation of a new geological period.

In the current SAA Archaeological Record, Braje et al. (2014) review the anthropocene concept briefly, and concentrate on the fact that most discussion so far has largely ignored archaeology. We have geologists and ecologists and others talking how humans have impacted the environment in the near and distant past, but without input from archaeology! I share the authors frustration. I've talked quite a bit in this blog about the problems that arise when scholars in other disciplines ignore archaeology when they are in fact talking about things that we have data about. Much easier to speculate about the past than to actually find the relevant data.
**ADDED JAN 31: Here are some of my prior posts on this: ***
"Do archaeologists know anything useful about premodern states?"  (2012)
"Why archaeologists need to publish outside of archaeology"  (2008)
"Publishing archaeology outside of archaeology"  (2007)

But part of the blame is our own. My initial reaction to the paper in the SAA Archaeological Record was to suggest that if archaeologists want to be accepted by other scholars, we should publish not in our own journals but in journals in other fields. But then I saw that there is a whole special section in the journal Anthropocene with archaeological papers; I cite Smith and Zeder (2014) above, and I also looked at Kennett and Beach (2014), although the connection of the latter with the anthropocene debate was not very clear.

So I forged on through Braje et al (2014), and came up short against a ridiculous statement:

• "The designation of an Anthropocene Epoch at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the appearance of artificial radionuclides associated with atomic detonations, or any other recent date harkens back to the faulty premise that pre-industrial humans lived in harmony with nature, and that a "natural" world existed in some idyllic pre-modern state." (Braje et al 2014:28).

Give me a break. I though this debate was about the evidence for human impact on the environment. When was serious environmental change initiated? How can we measure this? How can we compare environmental changes thousands of years ago with changes in the past three centuries? What is the most useful way to conceptualize and describe the history of human impacts on earth? These are empirical, scientific questions. But now we are told that those preferring a late date for the anthropocene must have faulty views about people living in harmony with nature! Huh?? The argument has now turned away from science and into ideology. Those with opposing scientific views must have faulty ideas about ancient humans. They must be in error.

Braje et al then quote from Steffan et al. (2007), who say that there were fewer people in the past whose simpler economic and technological organization did not modify the environment to the extent that we do today. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable interpretation to me. I don't see anything about living in harmony with nature.

I am not an expert in this topic, but here are my conclusions from reading the 2014 papers by archaeologists.

1. Humans have had significant impacts on environments going back thousands of years (the proper archaeological response is, "Well, duh!")
2. It is difficult to quantify those impacts to compare recent and ancient impacts.
3. The Anthropocene is a useful concept for addressing these issues.
4. I'm not sure of the best choice of dates to begin the Anthropocene; I think I might favor Smith and Zeder's early dates, but I don't have specialist knowledge here and I'm not strongly wedded to this view.
5. If archaeologists want scientists in other disciplines to take us seriously, we should avoid making silly ideological claims when we should be producing rigorous scientific findings.
6. We should publish in journals outside of archaeology. The section in the journal Anthropocene is a step in the right direction.

References:

Braje, Todd J., Jon M. Erlandson, C. Melvin Aikens, Tim Beach, Scott M. Fitzpatrick, Sara Gonzalez, Douglas J. Kennett, Patrick V. Kirch, Gyoung-Ah Lee, Kent G. Lightfoot, Sarah B. McClure, Lee M. Panich, Torben C. Rick, Anna C. Roosevelt, Tsim D. Schneider, Bruce D. Smith, and Melilnlda A. Zeder
2014    An Anthropocene Without Archaeology: Should we Care? SAA Archaeological Record 14 (1 (January)): 26-29.

Gowdy, John and Lisi Krall
2013    The Ultrasocial Origin of the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics 95: 137-147.

Kennett, Douglas J. and Timothy Beach
2014    Archaeological and Environmental Lessons for the Anthropocene from the Classic Maya Collapse. Anthropocene 2 (in press).

Robin, Libby and Will Steffen
2007    History for the Anthropocene. History Compass 5 (5): 1694-1719.

Roscoe, Paul B.
1995    The Perils of "Positivism" in Cultural Anthropology. American Anthropologist 97: 492-504.

Smith, Bruce D. and Melinda A. Zeder
2014    The Onset of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene 2 (in press).

Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill
2007    The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio 36: 614-621.

Steffen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and  John McNeill
2011    The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369: 842-867.

The "Grand Challenges" for Archaeology

A new paper, in the current issue of American Antiquity, presents a list and discussion of 25 "grand challenges" for archaeology in the near future. The authors also publish a short piece, mainly the list and the methods in which it was assembled, in PNAS (both are Kintigh et al. 2014). This is a fantastic paper - please go read it right away. The challenges are meant to be issues that can be addressed by archaeologists, are important to the discipline, and also "relevant to contemporary society" (p.7). They "excluded questions highly specific to place and time." I am enormously impressed with this list. Of course, I have my concerns and reservations about some issues, as everyone will. But this list will serve as a point of discussion in the discipline for some time.  I copy the entire list below, at the end of the post.

So, here are my quick comments and reservations. (these should not detract from my very strong support and admiration for this effort).

First, there is a glaring omission: states, empires, and processes of domination. How can they justify including "leaders" as a grand challenge, but not imperial conquest, political domination, and the great variation in premodern polities. Why isn't Blanton and Fargher (2008) included? This is the single most important work in the study of premodern complex societies in the past few decades. Why was it left out? Could this be due to the list of authors, which emphasizes small-scale societies more than complex societies?

Second, environmental topics are far over-represented, to my mind. They not only occupy seven challenges in group E (Human-environment interactions), but there are quite a few environmental themes included in the other groups as well. And why nothing on collective action?

Third, a number of the discussions of individual challenges are quite naive and parochial when considered in the context of the social sciences. For complex societies, archaeology and anthropology tend to stand outside the social sciences, rarely citing relevant literature in sociology or political science, developing our own concepts and approaches that are often quite limited in comparison with those in other fields. Here are some of the more glaring cases:

• A4, on the organization of communities. This is quite parochial and limited, with a very inadequate list of citations. I've blogged here about how the archaeology of community has dug itself into a corner by ignoring the dominant lines of social science research, and I won't repeat that here. Or see a paper where I cover this more rigorously (Smith n.d.).
• E3, on agricultural economies. The main causal variables mentioned are productive capacity, population, and innovation. OK, but for economic historians, more important are land tenure, the land:labor ratio, and social structure (systems of unfree labor, elites, etc.).
• I also found these discussions naive and parochial: E4 (ideology), C2 (environment, population and settlement), and C4 (migration).

And for a real stinker, consider D3, which uses code words to avoid the tainted term "phenomenology of landscape:" "How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development?"  Well, this one is a REAL challenge, since it deals with abstract and philosophical realms, whereas the other 24 deal with the empirical realm.

And, being picky here, under A6 (urbanism), Luis Bettencourt's name is misspelled in the text and in the bib (as "Betancourt").  Colman (2008), under A1 (leaders) is not in the bib.

So, enough carping. This is a fantastic exercise, and I hope it is the subject of much discussion in the years to come. What do you do if your research questions aren't on the list? Just because a topic is not a "grand challenge" does not mean it is not a very important research topic. I guess I have the opposite problem. Most of the larger themes and issues that I work on (except for states, empires, and domination!) are here: urbanism, inequality, communities, and market systems. Well, I guess households are not very well represented. Households are implicated in several of the challenges, but households or social structure are not targets of their own challenge. It's hard for me to see the value of including "experiential fields" and not households. But overall this is a great list.

List of the 25 grand challenges for archaeology.

A. Emergence, communities, and complexity

1.      How do leaders emerge, maintain themselves, and transform society?

2.      Why and how do social inequalities emerge, grow, persist, and diminish, and with what consequences?

3.      Why do market systems emerge, persist, evolve and, on occasion, fail?

4.      How does the organization of human communities at varying scales emerge from and constrain the actions of their members?

5.      How and why do small-scale human communities grow into spatially and demographically larger and politically more complex entities?

6.      How can systematic investigations of prehistoric and historic urban landscapes shed new light on the social and demographic processes that drive urbanism and its consequences?

7.      What is the role of conflict—both internal factional violence and external warfare—in the evolution of complex cultural formations?

B. Resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse

1.      What factors have allowed for differential persistence of societies?

2.      What are the roles of social and environmental diversity and complexity in creating resilience and how do their impacts vary by social scale?

3.      Can we characterize social collapse or decline in a way that is applicable across cultures, and are there any warning signals that collapse or severe decline is near?

4.      How does ideology structure economic, political, and ritual systems?

C. Movement, mobility, and migration

1.      What processes led to, and resulted from, the global dispersal of modern humans?

2.      What are the relationships among environment, population dynamics, settlement structure, and human mobility?

3.      How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerged as a result?

4.      Why does migration occur and why do migrant groups maintain identities in some circumstances and adopt new ones in others?

D. Cognition, behavior, and identity

1.      What are the biophysical, sociocultural, and environmental interactions out of which modern human behavior emerged?

2.      How do people form identities, and what are the aggregate long-term and large-scale effects of these processes?

3.      How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development?

E. Human–environment interactions

1.      How have human activities shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems, and when did humans become dominant drivers of these systems?

2.      What factors drive or constrain population growth in prehistory and history?

3.      What factors drive health and well-being in prehistory and history?

4.      Why do foragers engage in plant and animal management, and under what circumstances does management of a plant or animal lead to its domestication?

5.      Why do agricultural economies emerge, spread, and intensify, and what are the relationships among productive capacity, population, and innovation?

6.      How do humans respond to abrupt environmental change?

7.      How do humans perceive and react to changes in climate and the natural environment over short- and long-terms?




Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher  (2008)  Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright and Melinda Zeder  (2014)  Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79(1):5-24.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright and Melinda A. Zeder  (2014)  Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122:879-880.

Smith, Michael E.  (n.d.)  Quality of Life and Prosperity in Ancient Households and Communities. In The Oxford Handbook of Historical Ecology and Applied Archaeology (book in preparation), edited by Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump. Oxford University Press, New York. AVAILABLE ON ACADEMIA.EDU