Archaeology, Climate Change and Society

The study of ‘natural’ deposits such as ice sheets, glaciers, marine and lake sediments, peat bogs and soils may be used to shed light on past climates and human environments. Such deposits are often rich in archaeobotanical remains, which can provide sensitive indicators of past climate, soils and vegetation, and animal remains, which inform about the resources available to past human populations. These assemblages provide us clues to interpret human behaviour and anthropogenic impact in the environment, as well as insights on how climate change has affected human populations from the Quaternary until the present. Archaeology offers unique long-term and culturally-specific perspectives on human–climate interaction. Our discipline provides baselines for evaluating how past human populations have adapated to climate change in the past, thereby providing deep historical insights that assist our understanding of how people will react to contemporary climate issues such as sea level rise, island abandonment, biogeographic shifts and habitat change. This course examines human–climate interaction in the archaeological record from the emergence of hominids and hominins, the evolution and dispersal of modern humans, adaptations to glacial cyclicity during the Pleistocene and in particular the last glacial maximum (LGM), and into the historic present.