Climate Change - Past Perspectives
Climate change is something that our ancestors wrestled with--and sometimes lost. Archaeology has documented evidence of their successes and failures as the planet warmed or cooled, got drier or wetter, or was subjected to natural disasters.
Over the last 20,000 years, human societies have risen and fallen like the tide; many of them fell or rose because of their ability (or lack of it) to respond to natural disasters. Here are a few of the disasters for which there is archaeological evidence.
The CLIMAP Project was developed in the 1970s by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine is an interdisciplinary project studying the effects of planetary oscillations in climate. Several archaeologists contribute to this project.
This news report in Science Daily describes Dolores Piperno's investigations in the Balsas Valley of Mexico, where evidence of short-term climatic oscillations may have effected social change.
El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the name given to a climatological effect that has caused havoc in the present and in the past.
Archaeologist Brian Fagan proposes what most archaeologists will recognize as an old chestnut: climate change is seen as a--if not the--major determinant of cultural change. This revolutionary book points to the enormous amount of data being gathered on the climatic phenomena known collectively as ENSO--the El Niño Southern Oscillation.
Charles Redman's book puts the human actor at the forefront, detailing the impacts that human actions have had on the environment in the past 10,000 years.
About 7500 years ago, a continent-wide (perhaps a global) dry spell began, called the Altithermal by archaeologists, with sustained summer droughts and higher average temperatures. Archaic peoples on the high southern plains reacted by digging wells
In this essay, contributor Thomas F. King describes the work of archaeologist Bruce Masse, who uses the nascent subfield of geomythology to trace world reactions to a postulated comet crash ca 2800 BC.
In Archaeology magazine, Dale Mackenzie Brown discusses Eric the Red's failed colony on Greenland, and proposes that the failure occurred because they were unable to adapt to changing conditions.
