GEOARCHAEOLOGY BEYOND ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM: OBSERVATIONS AND RECORDS OF CULTURAL CONTINUITY AND RESILIENCE RECONSTRUCTED FROM GEOARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORDS

“Collapse” as a notion of demise remains a dominant theme in studies of ancient civilizations. Textbooks oversimplify the past: the fall of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty, the “mysterious” disappearance of the Maya and the Harappan, to name a few examples. As such, studying archaeology is increasingly promoted as a basis of prognostication for our modern Anthropocene, the timeframe when human agency became ascendant and affected global change. Models of collapse suggested that cultural downfall was predicated by hydroclimate-driven ecological and environmental crises that were both unavoidable and insurmountable, and resulted in finite end-points like abandonments and disappearances. Such deterministic or apocalyptic notions of societal collapses are appealing and tidy, but incomplete narratives. Emerging research moves beyond simplistic and linear interpretations of antiquity, invoking anthropological paradigms of continuity, social resilience and transformation, and approaches for resolving how cultures assimilated or coped by strategic adaptation, migration, socio-political reorganization or technological innovation. Interpretations of geoarchaeological records and environmental reconstructions underscore post-processual anthropological themes that view cultural change as a continuum through environmental changes. We now move beyond models of environmental determinism, and into modes of cultural adaptation and resilience by focussing on archaeological records that provide contexts for reconstructing how cultures coped. Formal resilience theory develops ecological concepts and more realistic frameworks for reconstructing the past by asking nuanced questions about sustainability strategies during political transitions, socio-political crisis events like warfare and disease, crop collapse, soil loss, extreme weather (e.g., hurricanes, floods, droughts), and resource availability. Resilience and persistence of cultures is a given; it is inherent in the progressive study of ancient cultures and modern societies living in marginal environments, and facing hydroclimate change, overpopulation, and scarcity of resources. In this manner, studying the past may be key to the present: geoarchaeology is vital for unpacking the Anthropocene as it further unfolds.