Archaeology as Sustainability Science: Perspectives from Ancient Island Societies

Abstract

Humans and the diverse ecosystems we inhabit face numerous sustainability challenges due to climate change, rising seas, population growth, overfishing, natural habitat destruction, accelerating extinctions, and more. As an interdisciplinary paradigm that leverages both natural and social sciences to better understand linkages between humans and the environment, sustainability science focuses on how these connections shape understandings of and approaches to sustainability challenges. Here, we argue that archaeology and historical ecology are essential components of sustainability science. We view sustainability as a long-term process where historical sciences are critical to effectively measuring where we stand today and modeling future trajectories based on the baselines from the past that archaeology and historical ecology provide. We demonstrate that islands around the world are central to this endeavor because they serve as model systems that can capture the timing of human arrival, subsequent effects of cultural behaviors on pristine environments, and how humans adapted, survived, and often thrived for centuries or millennia. These cases provide important lessons about human responses in the past to similar challenges that we now currently face. In the uncertain futures of the Anthropocene, such historical baselines will contribute significantly to scientific approaches for building more resilient and sustainable societies.