Burke Ariane, Grove Matt, Maier Andreas, Wren Colin, Drapeau Michelle, Poisot Timothée, Moine Olivier, Boisard Solène, Bruxelles Laurent
Département d'Anthropologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada.
Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jun 13;16(1):5289. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60450-9.
Cultural systems play an important role in shaping the interactions between humans and the environment, and are in turn shaped by these interactions. However, at present, cultural systems are poorly integrated into the models used by climate scientists to study the interaction of natural and anthropogenic processes (i.e. Earth systems models) due to pragmatic and conceptual barriers. In this Perspective, we demonstrate how the archaeology of climate change, an interdisciplinary field that uses the archaeological record to explore human-environment interactions, is uniquely placed to overcome these barriers. We use concepts drawn from climate science and evolutionary anthropology to show how complex systems modeling that focuses on the spatial structure of the environment and its impact on demographic variables, social networks and cultural evolution, can bridge the gap between large-scale climate processes and local-scale social processes. The result is a blueprint for the design of integrative models that produce testable hypotheses about the impact of climate change on human systems.
文化系统在塑造人类与环境之间的相互作用方面发挥着重要作用，而这些相互作用反过来又塑造着文化系统。然而，目前由于实际操作和概念上的障碍，文化系统在气候科学家用于研究自然和人为过程相互作用的模型（即地球系统模型）中整合程度较低。在本观点文章中，我们展示了气候变化考古学这一跨学科领域如何能够独特地克服这些障碍，该领域利用考古记录来探索人类与环境的相互作用。我们运用从气候科学和进化人类学中汲取的概念，展示专注于环境空间结构及其对人口变量、社会网络和文化进化影响的复杂系统建模如何能够弥合大规模气候过程与局部社会过程之间的差距。其结果是为设计综合模型提供了一个蓝图，这些模型能够产生关于气候变化对人类系统影响的可检验假设。
