Utengqaukut
Kristen Barnett
The current crisis of climate warming is an impetus for colonial dystopian fear (Kyle Powys Whyte), fueling the political landscape and resulting in an increase in environmental research with the hopes that western science will assuage this dystopia. Without minimizing the devastating impacts of climate warming for a global community, this work highlights the manner in which colonial imaginaries avoid reconciling with the 600 year dystopian cycle imposed by western colonial political powers onto Indigenous peoples worldwide including the climate cooling ca.1492 as the result of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the americas (Koch et al 2019). Therefore, colonial dystopian fears do not carry the same urgency for Indigenous communities who experience climate warming as part of an ongoing dystopia that began approximately 600 years ago.
This research focuses on a longstanding community partnership with Tuyuryaq (Togiak, Ak) and a collaborative Indigenous archaeology the “Yup’iit way”; centering youth, emphasizing intergenerational relationships through a lens of cyclical time, resiliency, and reclamation.
Toward a Critical Geoarchaeology—From Depositional Processes to the Socio-Politics of Earthen Life on the Deccan Plateau, Southern India
Andrew M. Bauer
In the last several decades, geoarchaeological research and practice have moved well beyond their foundational concerns for site formation processes and the stratigraphic integrity of artifact associations, developing significant orientations toward archaeological and social theory. In this paper, I discuss these developments in the context of geoarchaeological research on the Deccan Plateau of Southern India. Investigations of long-term human environment interactions in the region speak to recent emphases of “post-humanist” and “new materialist” scholarship and demonstrate the utility of geoarchaeological investigations to political ecology research programs, including critically problematizing the inherent politics of geological systematics and environmental knowledge (e.g., modernist narratives of the Anthropocene). Taken together, such recent developments in geoarchaeology offer new possibilities for the field to inform anthropological inquiries into social and environmental production, while also casting attention on how archaeological and geological fields of practice and discourse contribute to shaping social, political, and environmental conditions today.
Against Natural Resources: Engaging Indigenous Knowledge to Imagine the Past and the Future of the Amazon
Mariana Petry Cabral
Among the many concepts we apply to describe relationships between people and nature, ‘natural resources’ occupies a prominent role, offering in a condense and simple way some of the major challenges debates around the character of the Anthropocene pose: the split between nature and culture and the exploratory basis of such split. In this paper, I will follow some of the indigenous critiques to western ideas about the environment to foster archaeological engagements with indigenous knowledge in a way to push the archaeological imagination towards more inclusive and aware narratives of the past. I will draw my argument from a longtime partnership with the Wajãpi Indigenous People, from the Brazilian Amazon, with whom I learnt that all interactions with things we call “natural” are in fact political relationships, as they involve negotiation with other-than-humans beings. My aim is to point the relevance of indigenous knowledge for a better understanding of the history of the relationships between people and environment in the Amazon, connecting past narratives with the future of indigenous people and the Amazon.
Land, Water, Rights, & Indigenous Archaeology at Play in the US Southwest
Wade Campbell
In the contemporary US legal system, archaeology plays an important role as the author and arbiter of Native American presence (read: history) in a given region. This unique aspect of archaeology can place Native communities at odds with each other and with the historical legacy of the discipline, which for decades existed as the principal authority on Native communities’ early history. Using the Navajo Nation and the long history of archaeology in the US Southwest as an example, this presentation aims to highlight how the practice of Indigenous Archaeology can help Native communities avoid dispossession and political marginalization in contemporary environmental politics.
Sustainable Pasts & Futures in the Archaeological Imagination
Kathryn Catlin
Archaeologists who are interested in applying their work to “wicked problems” such as climate change face many challenges. One of the thorniest has been the problem of scale, both spatial and temporal. How can the story of one small site or region from perhaps thousands of years ago lead to novel insights that are of practical use to modern societies, or even to modern communities living in the same region within a vastly transformed social context? I’ll discuss an example from my own work in northern Iceland and how I have tried to grapple with some of these questions. By investigating the impact of infrastructure reuse on sustainable agricultural practice, I have suggested that Iceland’s human ecodynamics illustrate the decoupled nature of sustainability and economic equality (or justice). To meaningfully apply this insight to different scales and contexts, we must clarify exactly what is meant by “sustainability” and “justice,” including the material evidence required to assess whether the necessary conditions for sustainability and/or justice were met. From this starting point, it may be possible to infer the social and political relationships that made sustainable justice possible (or impossible). Finally, how might these relationships be effectively transposed across scales to bring fresh insights into contemporary environmental politics? I’ll conclude with a brief discussion of pedagogy and the archaeological imagination, which may ultimately be our most effective tool for ontological and political transformation.
Archaeology as Hyperlocal Practice: A Case Study in the Material Afterlives of the Cold War in the Circumpolar North
Emma Gilheany
This paper will attend to the way archaeologists work as place-based historians who can access narratives that can nuance and disrupt abstract or nebulous notions of climate change. Compelling local environmental histories can work to specify the nature of planetary crises. To demonstrate this, I turn archaeological attention to the material assemblages and toxic afterlives of a Cold War-era radar base in the circumpolar north, a place often treated as melting into the sublime or demonstrative of a planet in crisis. I argue that 1) archaeologists must engage with and foreground environmental concerns that living communities face in their region of study; 2) archaeological methodologies can work to document or witness environmental shifts and 3) archaeological scholarship can be applied to address crises on a local scale. This paper is based on archaeological, archival and ethnographic research conducted in Hopedale, Nunatsiavut since 2017.
Climate the Antagonist: Material Histories beyond Reification
Catherine Kearns
This talk interrogates some of the language in use in the Global North to describe human-environment relationships, especially those concerning climate or climate change, and some implications for the archaeological study of those interrelations in the past and present. Many discussions, across academic and public venues, deploy language that abstracts and reifies climate or climate change as a thing, at times even a dark or unseemly antagonist, which humanity must confront or battle before reaching certain crisis-thresholds. Recent calls for thinking with planetary scales of history undoubtedly spur some of this abstraction, reinvoking debates on the merits of smaller or larger scales of historiography. And while such rhetoric has worked to galvanize certain political feelings and public awareness of legal and policy fights against extractive capitalism, among other targets, it reduces human experiences and engagements with our material surroundings to agonistic narratives of winning and losing against something called climate, which have fueled a return to neo-determinism. Archaeologists, among other social scientists and humanists, have rightly pointed out that the “humanity” deployed in these stagings – most conspicuously the flattened anthropos of the anthropocene – is highly variable. Less attention has gone to the rhetoric of climate-thingness. In this talk I interrogate the reification of climate and its politics in the context of histories of environmental matter, thinking particularly about archaeological debates on scale and agency as well as their relevance to current global climate conversations. The talk touches on several examples from Mediterranean antiquity to advocate more complex, locally-grounded and messy environmental histories.
Archaeological Contributions to Biodiversity Conservation Efforts in China – Challenges and Prospects
Jada Ko
Among countries with the richest biodiversity, China also is on the top of the list with the most threatened wildlife. In recent years, China has adopted an active role in declaring an urgency to protect the rich biodiversity in the nation. A major emphasis of the Chinese conservation agenda is ecological restoration and reintroduction of species. While there are reports of success in restoration efforts, it is unclear how success is measured and whether or not these efforts are sustainable. In particular, baseline data (including lists of species and their natural distribution) used are often based on recent distribution and understanding of species. Moreover, long term human impacts on the environment prior to modern history are seldom discussed in any depth. Archaeologists recognize how our field allows reconstruction of past ecological landscapes and the life forms within them, as well as the human impacts on species distribution and population dynamics through time. Our discipline provides the necessary data and tools to define important terms in conservation and restoration including sustainability, degradation, and losses. However, in China, it is rare to see such contribution to biodiversity conservation. This paper addresses the challenges scholars of the past face in integrating our research with and participating in biodiversity conservation efforts in China. These challenges are discussed from the perspectives of the development of Chinese zooarchaeology (the archaeology of human-animal relationships) as a discipline, the conceptualization of natural and environmental sciences in China, biodiversity conservation trajectories, and political and economic development in the country.