Climate Change in Human (Pre)History

Catalog description

Human-induced climate change (i.e., anthropogenic climate change, a.k.a. “global warming”) is arguably the defining issue of our time. Importantly, contemporary anthropogenic climate change exists within natural patterns of climate variability that have profoundly impacted human societies for millennia. Thus, climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, has been and will continue to be a fundamental modulator of the human experience. Using data from archaeological, historical, and paleoenvironmental archives, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of past climate-change impacts on human societies, ecosystems, and landscapes across multiple spatio-temporal scales. This interdisciplinary perspective lends itself to uncovering potential lessons to be learned regarding our individual and collective options as we strive to understand, model, mitigate, and adapt to our contemporary climate-change crisis.