Archaeology and Sustainability?

In a recent issue of Anthropology News, Stephen Nash (2011) expresses doubt that archaeology can be used to solve contemporary environmental issues. Nash argues that never before has the world witnessed the effects of global industrial capitalism, and archaeology simply lacks qualitatively and quantitatively valid analogues to understand these processes comparatively: “Compared to human societies of the past, human society today is simply unrecognizable and, I would argue, not comparable” (Nash 2011:34). Nash’s perspective echoes many other contemporary criticisms (McAnany and Yoffee 2010) of past environmental degradation, particularly of those that appropriate the past to create a morality play of contemporary excess (e.g., Diamond 2005). Nash’s challenge questions not just archaeology’s limited role in the contemporary world but also archaeology’s integration within anthropology— a discipline that has an undeniable role to play in understanding, critiquing, and resolving contemporary problems. 

Admittedly, past political economies were structured differently than global industrial capitalism (Wolf 1982), which has led to resource depletion, poverty, and economic alienation on a scale never witnessed before in the history of humanity. But many of these criticisms are responses to simplified reconstructions of the past that center on single (or paired) variables, particularly demographic or climatological ones. In this respect, Nash is correct on empirical grounds. No contemporary sociocultural anthropologist would reduce complex human lives and historical configurations of people, places, and power to single variables even amid conditions of global warming and population growth. Why should archaeologists?

Diamond, J.

2005    Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed. Penguin.

McAnany, P. and N. Yoffee

2010    Questioning Collapse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Nash, S.

2011    Archaeology and Sustainability: Improbably Bedfellows. Anthropology News 52:34.

Wolf, E.

1982    Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.