Environmental Archaeology: Sustainability, Catastrophe, and Resilience

How did people in the past respond to environmental crisis? How did they modify their environments to suit their needs - sometimes to long-term detriment? How did they engage in sustainable practices, and build resilience into their local ecologies? In this course you will learn how archaeologists reconstruct paleoenvironments using multidisciplinary approaches, including botanical analyses, soil studies, and GIS modeling. You will learn how archaeologists tackle the problem of identifying ethnoecological relationships in the deep past, and how they track the impacts of these relationships on human history and the environment. Key case studies will be drawn from ancient societies in the Mesopotamia, Polynesia, West Africa, the American Southwest, Western China, the North Atlantic, and the Maya area.