International Council on Monuments and Sites, Climate Change and Heritage Working Group, Washington, DC 20036;
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Apr 14;117(15):8295-8302. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1914213117.
Climate science has outlined targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions necessary to provide a substantial chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change on both natural and human systems. How to reach those targets, however, requires balancing physical realities of the natural environment with the complexity of the human social environment, including histories, cultures, and values. Archaeology is the study of interactions of natural and social environments through time and across space. As well, the field of cultural resources management, which includes archaeology, regularly engages with values such as site significance and allocation of funding that the modern social environment ascribes to its own history. Through these two approaches, archaeology has potential to provide both data for and methods of addressing challenges the global community faces through climate change. To date, however, archaeology and related areas of cultural heritage have had relatively little role in the global climate response. Here, we assess the social environment of archaeology and climate change and resulting structural barriers that have limited use of archaeology in and for climate change with a case study of the US federal government. On this basis, we provide recommendations to the fields of archaeology and climate response about how to more fully realize the multiple potential uses of archaeology for the challenges of climate change.
气候科学已经为减少温室气体排放制定了目标，这些目标对于避免气候变化对自然和人类系统造成最坏影响具有重要意义。然而，如何实现这些目标需要平衡自然环境的物理现实与人类社会环境的复杂性，包括历史、文化和价值观。考古学是通过时间和空间研究自然和社会环境相互作用的学科。同样，包括考古学在内的文化资源管理领域经常涉及到一些价值观，例如遗址的重要性和资金分配，这些价值观是现代社会环境赋予其自身历史的。通过这两种方法，考古学有可能为全球社会通过气候变化所面临的挑战提供数据和解决方法。然而，迄今为止，考古学和相关的文化遗产领域在全球应对气候变化方面的作用相对较小。在这里，我们评估了考古学和气候变化的社会环境以及由此产生的结构性障碍，这些障碍限制了考古学在气候变化方面的应用，并以美国联邦政府为例进行了研究。在此基础上，我们向考古学和气候应对领域提供了建议，以充分实现考古学在应对气候变化挑战方面的多种潜在用途。
