A view from the past to the future: Concluding remarks on the ‘The Anthropocene in the Longue Durée’

In considering the concept of the Anthropocene, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008) argues that we can no longer separate studies of Natural History from Human History, and these two disciplinary distinctions are now inextricably intertwined. This perspective defines the approach we have taken in this Special Issue of The Holocene. The assembled papers deal with many facets of human–environmental relationships leading to the rise of the Anthropocene by examining a geographically and culturally diverse set of sites and case studies from a deep-time perspective. With these concluding remarks, we highlight some key issues resulting from this collection of papers, emphasizing the important contribution of a deep-time interdisciplinary perspective to our understanding of how we arrived in this current environmental situation as well as how we might find a path forward into a more sustainable future.

To begin, we wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to Karl Butzer, a mentor and a colleague who has been dealing with such complex issues as the relationships between humans and their environments for half a century. His work has inspired archaeologists, geographers, and many others and includes classics such as Environment and Archaeology (1964), Archaeology as Human Ecology (1982), as well as many other timely publications. Reasoned and provocative, he has urged us to examine more broadly the contexts, connections, and concepts that undergird our disciplines and the human presence in the world. He argues in this Special Issue and elsewhere that there is indeed a need for the concept of the Anthropocene, as it helps focus the attention of scientists and the public on critical debates about how to shape the future of our planet.

This point also is well illustrated by Christophe Bonneuil (2013) who analyzes the main narrative themes of the Anthropocene, arguing that the way we tell the ‘story’ influences the way the future will unfold. He describes four types of narration relating to the concept of the Anthropocene: institutional/scientific, postmodern/post-nature, catastrophist, and ecomarxist:

These themes suggest that we are not at the end of the world but the dawn of an epoch. The term epoch marks the event-anchored beginning of an era in both the biophysical sciences (for instance, ‘glacial epochs’) and in the social sciences and humanities (the ‘medieval epoch’). Bonneuil argues that the epoch of the Anthropocene will be structured in substantial part by the narrative(s) we use to understand the changes it brings. Thus, ‘epochs’ are a rich arena for the practice of the closely linked disciplines of Anthropology, Archaeology, Geography, and History and make good use of their familiarity with Earth System sciences (e.g. Geology, Ecology, and Climatology). These disciplines have mutable boundaries and draw on several perspectives. Indeed, it must be emphasized that the paradigms and approaches represented by these disciplines are not mutually exclusive. Modern and postmodern perspectives are not in contest, but rather should be used in tandem to help define how we conceive and frame the Anthropocene. So how might these inherently polyvalent and meaning-making disciplines advance our thinking about livable futures in the Anthropocene?

Focusing on a broadly conceived definition of history, the Anthropocene causes us to stretch our temporal perspective, especially regarding deep time (Earth history as well as the distant human past). William Ruddiman’s (2003) paper in Climatic Change kicked off an interesting and overdue debate about when (and how) human activity began to modify global climate. This discussion was carried further by Smith and Zeder (2013) who suggest that the Anthropocene is coeval with the Holocene, and both terms are necessary since human ‘niche construction’ accelerated exponentially after the Holocene with the spread of domestication. The natural sciences (e.g. Geology, Physical Geography, and various paleoenvironmental studies) and the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Anthropology, Human Geography, Archaeology, and History) have much to contribute to this discussion, not least because these disciplines collaborate comparatively easily across the Two Cultures divide (Natural Sciences and Social Sciences).

There is much to prepare for if we are to answer Ruddiman’s challenge. In this collection of papers, we chose to begin our investigation of the Anthropocene even further back in time, with the earliest control of fire (ca. 500,000 BP) by our Homo erectus hominin ancestors. This technological advance marks humanity’s ability to profoundly impact the natural environment at the local and regional scale (Albert, this issue). This interest in tracing and evaluating the scale of anthropogenic fire disturbance is revisited several times in this volume, at different time periods and regions (Lightfoot and Cuthrell, this issue; Piperno et al., this issue; Stahl, this issue). Evidence for early anthropogenic disturbance addresses the issue of who we are as a species. We thrive by creating and modifying our environments. This latter point is emphasized for late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Jordan in the paper by Ramsey et al. (this issue). This also highlights the fact that we are continually inheriting new and changed ecologies, ‘constructed environments’ that are bequeathed to us successively by earlier generations.

The notion of the Anthropocene as a temporal unit reminds archaeologists of the need to revisit how Big Periods (e.g. the Neolithic Period) are constructed and to examine their edges, when time ‘speeds up’ and change is rapid. This effort requires close attention to changes across broad temporal and spatial scales. The end of epochs are periods of widespread change (‘cliffs’ or ‘tipping points’) driven by a mix of events and their consequences, previous decisions, and stubbornly held convictions. What ‘caused’ these changes? The answer is not the linear history of the periods found in schoolbooks, but a mix of circumstances that together threatened the stability of the previous system. What is important to discover is a system’s context and to identify its strengths and vulnerabilities (see Butzer, this issue). Learning about the Anthropocene in deep time is central to understanding how we can respond to these issues in the present.

In this collection of papers, we chose to emphasize the Anthropocene as a process, rather than an ‘event’ or ‘tipping point’ that has a distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’. Having said this, there are points in time and geographic space that demonstrate pronounced local spikes in human land use, such as the case of the Ancient Maya and the ‘Mayacene’ (Beach et al., this issue; see also Jones et al., this issue, for Iran). We have much to learn from these studies, but they are temporally and spatially variable and sometimes reversible in their effects (Lewin and Macklin, 2014).

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of a venture into the study of human-and-Earth complex systems is the question of relevance. Those who study the past are unused to asking how it could influence the future, but the tools for learning about recurrent issues in human societies are familiar and available. If there are really ‘lessons from the past’, we must carefully analyze these dynamic systems as completed cycles, from which meta-narratives of risk, vulnerability, flexibility, and resilience can be assembled (see, for example, Brewington et al., this issue; Streeter et al., this issue, for the North Atlantic; Kidder and Zhuang, this issue; Rosen et al., this issue, for China).Tracing leads and lags, path dependence, emergence, and other features of complex systems across time and space requires teamwork among a broad spectrum of specialists. For example, analysis of an erosion ‘event’ requires different spatial frames and fine-grained chronologies, supported by many scholarly specialties. Today, the global coverage of research and the deep-time history of human activity can begin to support such investigations of land use and landscapes (see Brewington et al., this issue; Streeter et al., this issue).

Focusing on anthropology, the Anthropocene gives us reason to ask again, in both jest and in earnest: Who knew this was coming? One answer could be scientists, who monitor the health of the Earth. But it was indigenous groups – those who live with a close connection to the land, and those who labored in cities and in the countryside who were among the first who knew and felt the more profound effects of the Anthropocene. The dramatic reduction of the need for labor following mechanization and the concentration of resources in fewer hands increased poverty for the many and wealth for the few (Palsson et al., 2013). In this perspective, the Anthropocene is, first and foremost, an economic epoch in part characterized by growing inequality.

Chakrabarty (2008: 208–209) also examines the economic implications of the Anthropocene, but he maintains that the progressively intensive use of fossil fuels has increased freedoms for more of humanity than at any other time in our history, yet this came about at the expense of biodiversity and the health of all other planetary systems. This point is illustrated in the paper by Laparidou and Rosen (this issue) which discusses the interplay between the agricultural economic interests of the Mamluk state and the peasant subsistence agricultural systems and its impact on semi-arid environments of Jordan.

Focusing on geography, the much-studied frames of landscape and of region can help link planetary phenomena and local practice. A region’s history reveals how that place has responded to extreme events: harsh climate, war, shortage of essential resources, pestilence, and mismanagement (see the discussion of the ‘Dustbowl’ by Cordova and Porter, this issue; Jones, this issue, on the effect of Spanish colonial herding practices on landscapes in New Mexico). In mediating these events, successful adjustments to fit changing circumstances have accumulated. Following complex systems terminology, there may be particular economic and social strategies – ‘basins of attraction’ – whose strength fluctuates over time. Knowledge of a particular landscape’s past management strategies can help to avoid earlier mistakes or, in the case of good results, offer viable alternatives to a similar contemporary challenge (see, for example, the cases of Neolithic woodland management in the Southern Levant (Asouti et al., this issue) and also the case of sustainable management of bird and pig resources in the North Atlantic Medieval communities in Iceland (Brewington et al., this issue)). Reviewing such ‘old-and-new’ solutions stimulates ‘tinkering’ – trying to improve on an old idea or material – and may lead to hybrid innovations. That a technique dates to prehistory does not necessarily mean it is sustainable today, but its longevity certainly demonstrates its utility. ‘Old ways’ of doing things can have advantages that go beyond nostalgia and tourism. Rivera-Collazo (this issue) makes this point in her discussion of middle- to late-Holocene Caribbean hunter-gatherers who were well-adapted to their island habitat, and how the use of natural resources in the present was shaped by experiences in the distant past. In contrast, Streeter et al. (this issue) provide cautionary evidence for more extensive landscape change associated with the first colonization of Iceland. Also note the destructive nature of intensive agricultural practices during the expansion of the Han Empire in China (Kidder and Zhang, this issue; Rosen et al., this issue) and evidence for human impact in Iran (Jones et al., this issue).

All these strands of history, politics, landscape, and culture, as they relate to the physical world, have been tied together before in the French historical tradition termed Annales (Burke, 1990). In the 1920s, a group of young historians in France broke with their discipline by emphasizing not just the events of history but their context: geography, ethnography, folklore, geology, and, importantly, climate. The Annalistes’ humanistic and dialectical approach provided a new collaborative framework for the study of the history of broad regions (e.g. the work of Braudel, 1966). Their analysis of processes that vary along temporal scales of duration, intensity, and periodicity has proven especially fruitful. They conceived of historical processes in terms of événement (event), conjoncture (their cultural and historical context), and longue durée (long-term trends) (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013). Interpretation relies on all three: an account must be set in both immediate and more distant contexts, connecting such apparently disparate data as a cleric’s records of famine victims with evidence from a glacier half a world away.

Indeed, the inspiration for the workshop held at the University of Texas at Austin (22–23 April 2014) under the auspices of the Department of Anthropology, UT, and the GHEA (the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance) group came from some of these basic concepts rooted in the forward-thinking Annales school. We strongly emphasized the important role of an interdisciplinary approach to the interactions of humans and the environment on local and global scales, the critical importance of weaving the social science perspectives together with the natural sciences, and the key role of viewing these issues within the framework of a deep-time perspective and hence the unifying concept of The Anthropocene in the Longue Durée.

Broadening the narratives of the Anthropocene to include old and new sciences of the environment, inclusive of ethics, reflexive practice, and a loose application of the complex systems framework, this heterarchy of approaches allows researchers to address time and space simultaneously, study human modification of the global ecosystem, and assess how human thought and action has shaped the present world. What better gift to the future?