SOAN 306 | The Archaeology of Climate Change

Climate change has recently become shorthand for Global Warming, the clearcutting of rainforests, and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet while anthropogenic climate change on the global scale is indeed a modern phenomenon, climate change itself is nothing new, and human societies have been negotiating their natural world for millennia; adapting to changing conditions by inventing new technologies, adopting new social structures, and even modifying the landscapes around them.
This course uses examples from around the world, including Africa, the Mediterranean, Australia, the Americas, Asia, and the British Isles to examine how past societies perceived and interacted with their environments. Aspects of collecting, analyzing and interpreting various climate proxies, and the theoretical foundations for interpreting their relevance to archaeological questions, will constitute major components of this course.