Norwich, UK
University of East Anglia 18-20 December 2023
18.Questioning Post-humanism: Archaeological Approaches to Climate Change
NEWSCI 0.02
Session Abstract
Taking direct inspiration from last TAG’s session on Climate Archaeology, we invite presentations that explore how our discipline can reveal insights into climate change. In particular, we will explore the potentialities and pitfalls of posthumanist approaches to climate change archaeology. For some, posthumanism introduces valuable ideas that can enhance our conceptualisation of climate, while for others, posthumanism might compromise proper climate research. Here, we aim to confront a multitude of visions to sketch an improved theoretical approach based on posthumanism that can be applied to archaeological research on climate. Therefore, we warmly invite posthumanist, anti- posthumanist, or posthumanist-ambivalent speakers that explore archaeological investigation into climate change.
Furthermore, we would like to interrogate how approaches based on Human Ecodynamics, Historical Ecology, and Political Ecology can complement or nuance postulates from flat or symmetrical ontologies. We are first and foremost interested in complex systems and human- environment or human-nonhuman entanglements. All of these approaches, moreover, point to large and multiple scales of temporality: temporalities that unite past and present. We invite serious archaeological investigation into the material remains of both our deep and contemporary pasts for insights into climate change. Therefore, we also seek proposals that use Archaeology either to understand the past to ameliorate climate change or that explore contemporary archaeological records that enhance our understanding of the dynamics contributing to global warming.
Organisers: Brandon Fathy (University of Reading) and Pablo Barruezo-Vaquero (University of Granada)
Presenters:
Peter Campbell (Cranfield University), Object-Oriented Ecology: Life (and Archaeology) in the Margin of Hyperobjects
Andrew Bauer (Stanford University), The Anthropocene as an Event: Posthumanism, Processes, and Politics
Sam Challis (University of the Witwatersrand) and Brian Stewart (University of Michigan), Ritual and Social Adaptations to Climate Change in the Neoglacial of Southern African Mountains
Marcy Rockman (University of Maryland), A Response in Responsibility: Archaeology in Relation to Climate Change
Andy Hutcheson (UEA), Is this the Road to Hell? Money and its implications in the mid 1st millennium BCE
Candace Gossen (Ronin Institute), 2027: Waking the Aku