Mediterranean archeology and environmental histories in the spotlight of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract The last two decades have seen increasing scientific and humanistic research about anthropogenic impacts on earth systems such as climate, leading to a controversial proposal that we are living in an Anthropocene epoch, when humans have become unprecedented forces of global change. The status of the Anthropocene as a historiographical period poses an opportunity to consider how archeologists and historians conceive of environmental and social change in Mediterranean antiquity. Scholarship has tended to focus on regional landscapes or large‐scale climatic accounts of the rise and fall of societies and less on the politics and social dimensions of human–environment relationships. Although bridging the small and large scales of these interactions poses challenges, recent research on the island of Cyprus during the Archaic period highlights the possibilities of an archeological approach to the intersections between social and environmental Mediterranean histories and their material contexts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.