Archaeology’s Golden Opportunity: Transforming the Science of Global Environmental Change

Abstract

Earth and other natural scientists frequently depict human-caused global environmental change as a recent development, a perspective exemplified by the proposal to formalize a human epoch in the Geologic Time Scale—the Anthropocene—beginning in 1952. Yet the science of archaeology offers abundant evidence of anthropogenic planetary change over thousands of years, from land clearing using fire to early methane emissions from agriculture, preindustrial lead pollution, and long-sustained Indigenous practices that continue to shape ecosystems and biodiversity. Even though archaeology is the only science dedicated to investigating human social and environmental change from its very beginnings up to the present day, its empirical evidence and theoretical understandings are largely absent from the datasets, models, and theories of global environmental change. We argue that this situation represents both a missed opportunity for scientific discovery and a rare opportunity for archaeologists. Archaeology can and should play a central role in the science of global environmental change. By mobilizing and integrating regional datasets globally, standardizing metadata, and aligning them with Earth-system data frameworks and models, archaeologists could revolutionize the science of global environmental change through empirically based, culturally grounded insights into the deep history of planetary transformation by human societies.