Expanding use of archaeology in climate change response by changing its social environment.

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.

Hidden nuggets: nautical archeology and laboratory management.

Although the professions of nautical archaeology and clinical laboratory management seem to involve different bodies of knowledge, many of the principles and truisms of archaeology correlate to the art of laboratory management. On two occasions, I have been a member of a team excavating a 350-year-old shipwreck off the north shore of the Dominican Republic. I have illustrated those experiences to demonstrate that these seemingly disparate professions share frustrations that interfere with the pursuit of useful knowledge as well as successes that lead to new knowledge.