Correlation Is Not Enough - Building Better Arguments in the Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions

The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. As they do so, they are emphasizing the complexity of the dynamics underlying both human responses to environmental changes and anthropogenic impacts on environments. Although archaeology has a long history of interest in human impacts on environments and environmental influences on human activities, construction of detailed arguments about causality in such interactions remains a persistent challenge. Limitations in chronological resolution of archaeological data and paleoenvironmental archives pose a methodological problem, while equifinality remains an interpretative challenge. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one.