THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD AS A PALEOCLIMATIC AND PALEOENVIRONMENTAL ARCHIVE

With the advent of archaeological geology as a distinct, interdisciplinary field, interest in human ecodynamics, the relationship among climate, environment, and culture, has increased. In the past, archaeological geology tended to focus on site descriptions and the role of climatic and environmental change as potential drivers of cultural change. Consequently, descriptions of cultural and societal change around the world have frequently been tied to geological features and both abrupt and long-term climatic change, albeit with increasing recognition of the outstandingly complex nature of human and natural systems and their interactions. This focus on causation has sometimes distracted researchers from the rich and often unique evidence of past climatic and landscape changes that is contained in the archaeological record. Proxies for environmental change are held in a wide range of materials that are part of archaeological investigations undertaken with the goal of understanding past human behavior. These materials include, among others, sediments and floral and faunal materials that can be analyzed in a variety of ways to produce paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental information. Although archaeological proxies are subject to both human and natural formation and taphonomic processes, it is still possible to extract clear signals of climate and environment from them. Recognition of this rich record has led to a growing use of archaeological proxy data by climate scientists, and often plays a role in hindcasting and forecasting changing climatic, environmental, and geomorphic alterations on a variety of scales.