Environmental Archaeology

Catalog description

This course examines the fundamentally important relationship between human behavior and environmental change in the past. It looks at both the ways in which humans have responded to their environmental circumstances and the ways in which human activities have influenced environmental conditions at various scales. The course explores methods for learning about environmental conditions in the past and the nature of human interaction with the environment. The course also presents basic information on some particularly important topics concerning past human/environment interactions, including (1) causes of global climate change, (2) human roles in Pleistocene megafauna, (3) post-Pleistocene adaptation, (4) the origins of agriculture and animal domestication, (5) agricultural landscape modification and environmental over-exploitation, and (6) Holocene changes in human health, including the origins of modern disease epidemics.