Environmental Archaeology

From Neanderthals on the brink of extinction to the smog of the Industrial Revolution, humans have been impacted by the environment for millions of years. How has climate change affected the development of human society? How have people adapted to their environments in the past? What does "sustainability" mean over the long term? Environmental archaeology is the study of these questions through the use of scientific techniques to analyze soils, plants, artifacts, and human and animal remains from ancient archaeological contexts. These methods will be introduced with an eye toward how they allow us to interpret human-environmental interactions in the past, as well as the present and future.