Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013-7012;
Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Apr 14;117(15):8250-8253. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2003612117.
We live in an age characterized by increasing environmental, social, economic, and political uncertainty. Human societies face significant challenges, ranging from climate change to food security, biodiversity declines and extinction, and political instability. In response, scientists, policy makers, and the general public are seeking new interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches to evaluate and identify meaningful solutions to these global challenges. Underrecognized among these challenges is the disappearing record of past environmental change, which can be key to surviving the future. Historical sciences such as archaeology access the past to provide long-term perspectives on past human ecodynamics: the interaction between human social and cultural systems and climate and environment. Such studies shed light on how we arrived at the present day and help us search for sustainable trajectories toward the future. Here, we highlight contributions by archaeology-the study of the human past-to interdisciplinary research programs designed to evaluate current social and environmental challenges and contribute to solutions for the future. The past is a multimillennial experiment in human ecodynamics, and, together with our transdisciplinary colleagues, archaeology is well positioned to uncover the lessons of that experiment.
我们生活在一个以环境、社会、经济和政治不确定性日益增加为特征的时代。人类社会面临着从气候变化到粮食安全、生物多样性减少和灭绝以及政治不稳定等重大挑战。作为回应，科学家、政策制定者和公众正在寻求新的跨学科或交叉学科方法，以评估和确定应对这些全球挑战的有意义的解决方案。在这些挑战中，被低估的是过去环境变化的记录正在消失，而这对于未来的生存至关重要。考古学等历史科学可以通过获取过去的信息，为过去人类生态动力学提供长期视角：人类社会和文化系统与气候和环境之间的相互作用。这些研究揭示了我们如何到达今天，并帮助我们寻找未来可持续发展的轨迹。在这里，我们强调了考古学——对人类过去的研究——对旨在评估当前社会和环境挑战并为未来解决方案做出贡献的跨学科研究计划的贡献。过去是人类生态动力学的一项多千年实验，考古学与我们的跨学科同事一起，有能力揭示该实验的教训。
