Anthropology and Climate Change

From Encounters to Actions

Susan A Crate, Mark Nuttall, Susan A Crate, Mark Nuttall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315434759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first book to comprehensively assess anthropology's engagement with climate change, this pioneering volume both maps out exciting trajectories for research and issues a call to action. Chapters in part one are systematic research reviews, covering the relationship between culture and climate from prehistoric times to the present; changing anthropological discourse on climate and environment; the diversity of environmental and sociocultural changes currently occurring around the globe; and the unique methodological and epistemological tools anthropologists bring to bear on climate research. Part two includes a series of case studies that highlights leading-edge research—including some unexpected and provocative findings. Part three challenges scholars to be proactive on the front lines of climate change, providing instruction on how to work in with research communities, with innovative forms of communication, in higher education, in policy environments, as individuals, and in other critical arenas. Linking sophisticated knowledge to effective actions, Anthropology and Climate Change is essential for students and scholars in anthropology and environmental studies.

Part 1
Climate and Culture

Chapter 1
HUMAN AGENCY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND CULTURE: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

FEKRI A. HASSAN

INTRODUCTION

In 1914, the geologist and explorer J. W. Gregory inquired if the earth was drying up. He surveyed various sources of data from Scandinavia to China and concluded that there was, in general, no evidence of climate change in historical times. Furthermore, Gregory noted that there was a great deal of controversy concerning paleoclimatic interpretations and the probable causes of climate change. Today, our knowledge of climate change in historical times has improved immensely (Mayewski et al. 2004; Shulmeister et al. 2006), yet we are still not clear about the magnitude, scale, timing and frequency of climatic changes, and are unable to provide conclusive evidence of the causes of certain paleoclimatic events (for news on current research on past global changes see the PAGES project [Past Global Changes]).¹ We are also far from certain of the probable impact of climate change on the trajectory of human history. H. H. Lamb (1982), in his seminal volume Climate History and the Modern World, reviews in detail both the lack of sufficient paleoclimatological data and, more importantly, the limitations of our methodologies and our interpretative strategies.

Climate change is no longer a matter solely of academic interest. People throughout the world are now aware of the impact of climate change on contemporary societies. For example, when the Sahelian droughts in the 1970s caused severe famines threatening the lives of millions of Africans, most scholars agreed that the droughts were, in part, caused by human activities, such as land use, overgrazing, overfarming, inappropriate irrigation, and inadequate governmental policies (Hulme 2001; Reynolds and Smith 2001; Zeng 2003). This spurred debate over the exact role of human activities in land degradation and droughts and ushered in an increasing appreciation of human agency in environmental change.

This chapter elucidates the intractable and complex interrelationship between climate and human societies with a plea to overcome simplistic notions of determinism and indeterminacy. Climate, as I show through case studies in Southwest Asia and North Africa, played a major role in the origins of agriculture, the emergence of state societies, and the temporary breakdown of the centralized organization of complex state societies. However, the impact of any climatic event depends on the local ecological setting and the organizational complexity, scale, ideology, technology, and social values of the local population. It is only through long-term archaeological and historical analysis, as well as detailed examination of the social dynamics on local and regional scales within an interregional framework, that we can begin to detect the differential impact of the same climatic event.

I wish here to emphasize the rigor needed to make any assertion of the causal role of climate. It is misleading, for example, to list the frequency of radiocarbon age determinations as a proxy to climate change, or to cull a selection of a few archaeological cases from different regional and temporal contexts to underscore the role of climate in the “collapse” of civilizations on the basis of dubious chronological determinations, climatic reconstructions, and cultural interpretations. Frequencies of radiocarbon age measurements of archaeological occurrences are not directly a function of intensity of human occupation, but more so of a series of formation processes as well as the intensity of archaeological research and dating objectives. It is important to infer climatic events from well-dated geological and environmental proxies. Archaeologists also need to pay attention to the screening of radiocarbon data to ensure that they accurately date the event under consideration. Precision in this can be improved by the use of multiple measurements and statistical analysis. In this chapter, I report events based on radiocarbon age determinations as calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal BP).

At present, new drilling methods to obtain samples, dating, and analytical techniques have improved our current understanding of climate change. Data retrieved over the last two decades have shown that climate change is not always gradual or cyclical, but that dramatic shifts in climate can take place rapidly (Allen and Anderson 1993; Street-Perrott and Perrott 1990). Such rapid events occur within less than a century and the change can be quite severe (Adams, Maslin, and Thomas 1999; Rahmstorf 2001; Taylor 1999). One of the most remarkable transitions, which had a major impact on the history of humankind, was the end of the last major cold spell, a period known as the Younger Dryas. A large part of this global switch from cold to warm climate took less than twenty years: “There was no warning. A threshold was crossed, and the climate in much of the world shifted abruptly from cold to warm” (Taylor 1999, 323). Abrupt climatic events are not just rapid; they are also breaking points, thresholds resulting from strongly nonlinear responses to “forcing”² (Rahmstorf 2001, 2). Rahmstorf singles out an event, dated to 8,200 years ago during the Holocene that shows a spike in arctic ice cores, which affected the North Atlantic. He also recognizes the abrupt desertification of the Sahara 5,500 years ago with evidence from Atlantic sediments off northeastern Africa that show a sudden and dramatic step-function increase in wind-blown dust, indicative of the drying of the African continent. Similarly, the last ice age, like previous ice ages, was punctuated by abrupt climatic transitions.³

I also wish to emphasize the role of human agency. Different groups guided by the decisions of all or key figures in the community seem to pursue different strategies in coping with a climatic crisis in their region. However, it seems that the choice is limited to a few options at any one time, and that certain options seem to be favored by the majority of the population. Further, interaction within and between regions seems to provide different groups with the choice of reconsidering their position. In some cases they may adopt or adapt certain innovations that they deem to be advantageous. However, people inevitably make decisions on the basis of subjective probabilities, biased information derived from anecdotal evidence, and prejudicial positions based on their values and worldviews. Additionally, the long-term consequences of any decision are not, in most cases, apparent within the lifetime of a person or a couple of generations. It is thanks to human ingenuity, not climate change, that in responding to environmental crises or endogenous cultural perturbations (Hassan 1993) people tend to make adjustments to sustain their modes of life. In so doing, they unwittingly set the stage for new problems that future generations have to cope with.

Endowed with the vision of a “good life” and the capacity to modify habitats, people have introduced changes that ultimately lead to the emergence of new conditions that expand their capability of modifying their environment. Today we have reached the point at which our human impact now extends to a modification of the forces that regulate the climate of our planet (Goudie 1993; Hassan 1992; Redman 2004). Our environmental impact has increased with our continued expansion and intensification of food production and industrial products, caused by adapting agriculture, developing complex managerial organizations (state societies), expanding the size of the labor force, and utilizing progressively more powerful sources of energy beginning with draft animals and ending with nuclear power. In the meantime, our numbers have soared from a few million during the Pleistocene to more than six billion today, with unprecedented rates of population increase over the last one hundred years (Lutz, Sanderson, and Scherbov 2004).

Clearly our modern crises are not caused solely by climate change. But today, as in the past, societies become vulnerable to millennial or centennial climatic changes because they do not recall or anticipate abrupt, severe climatic events that are outside the range of human reckoning and collective memory (Hassan 2000b). People and societies, as my analysis of agricultural origins in this chapter shows, are conservative. They tend to guard and cling to the paradigms, values, and institutions that have proved to be successful in their own past based on coping with decadal fluctuations in climate change or multigenerational social perturbations. As a result they are reluctant to undertake corrective actions that go against their social grain—for example, moving from a mobile subsistence economy to a settled economy (a process that took more than five thousand years in the Levant). The veneration for old habits, which may become encoded in religious precepts, is in most cases advantageous, but it is harmful if adhered to dogmatically in all cases given endogenous cultural developments and novel external conditions. Today certain interest groups in many countries are still reluctant to accept the impact of climate change on current and future human affairs. In so doing they miss not only the lessons from world history, but also the opportunity to examine the social dimensions of climate change critically.

Also, because modern industrial nations overvalue industry and science, current efforts to cope with climate change focus on reducing emissions or the use of new alternate technologies instead of considering the social dimensions of climate change. Studies of climate change are still dominated by climatologists and environmental scientists, though the last few years have witnessed some overtures for collaboration among social and environmental scientists (see Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffan 2007; Costanza et al. 2007; Dearing, Cromer, and Kiefer 2007).

The threat of climate change may divert our attention from the explosive nature of our postindustrial world, with its inequities and mass poverty, expanding population, progressive organizational complexification, and spiraling demands for critical resources. These factors compound the danger from climate change. We should recall that climate change, as in the case of the Classic Maya civilization, may be a catalyst hastening collapse.

In the following sections I discuss the problem of confusing correlation and causation and the role of human agency in recognizing and responding to climate change with reference to the limitation of the human scale. I then review the main millennial climatic events that influenced the course of human history over the last 13,000 years to illustrate the frequency of abrupt, severe events that humans have had to cope with since the emergence of humankind. I subsequently deal briefly with the role of climatic events in the peopling of the world during the last 100,000 years, followed by a summary of the role of climate change in the origins of food production, with a primary focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa. This discussion reveals the importance of regional expressions of climate change and the role of independent innovations that converge toward similar solutions following a similar sequence in historical developments. I then deal with the impact of climate change on the spread of food production to other parts of the world and the beginning of significant cultural differentiation under varying environmental conditions. The last part of this chapter considers the origins and collapse of civilizations in different parts of the world to illustrate that the impact of severe abrupt climatic events is not necessarily negative. This should serve as an antidote to sensationalist accounts of the role of climate in destroying civilizations.

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, AND OVERSIMPLIFICATION

Archaeologists have for a long time debated the role of climate change in human affairs. Gordon Childe (1928, 1934) made one of the most influential contributions with his contention that desiccation by the end of the glacial period led to the emergence of agriculture, as people congregated along river courses and within the orbit of oases, where conditions were appropriate for the domestication of plants and animals. The relationship between climate change and the origins of food production was revisited in the 1960s, as Binford (1968) linked post-Pleistocene climatic events with agricultural origins in arid regions. He hypothesized that a worldwide change in sea level in post-Pleistocene times led to a greater exploitation of fish and other aquatic resources, which prompted sedentary settlements and rapid population increase where food resources were abundant. Excess population from such optimal zones was forced into less productive, marginal habitats where food production was initiated out of necessity.

More recently, Weiss highlighted the causal role of climate in cultural evolution (Weiss et al. 1993). Together with Bradley et al. (2001, 610), by making use of high-resolution paleoclimatic data they argued that climate change has been a primary agent in repeated social collapse. However, such generalizations fail to acknowledge the intricate relationship between human agency and the impact of climate change on societies. Archaeologists have been hampered in the past by crude data on climate change and poorly dated environmental and cultural events. Explanations based on climatic forcing depended upon rough correlations, which were often hastily translated to causal linkages with climate playing a determining role.

Correlations are uncertain because climatologists still do not agree on the mechanisms and details of climate change during the last 10,000 years (the Holocene) in spite of attempts since 1983 to using radiocarbon dating (Bond et al. 1997). In addition, some climatic events are global, while others are regional or local. In some cases, in the absence of well-dated climatic records in an area, correlation with global events may be erroneous when local evidence is lacking. Moreover, some global events are time transgressive and may not be of the same amplitude, duration, or even direction (e.g., wet episodes may be synchronous with dry events) in different regions.

Even when adequate records of climate change and high-resolution archaeological data exist for a given region, other appropriate information— for example, on rates of depopulation and relocation and the extent of famines, morbidities, or land use—needed to explain the causal role of cl...