1
|
Frachetti M, Di Cosmo N, Esper J, Khalidi L, Mauelshagen F, Oppenheimer C, Rohland E, Büntgen U. The dahliagram: An interdisciplinary tool for investigation, visualization, and communication of past human-environmental interaction. SCIENCE ADVANCES 2023; 9:eadj3142. [PMID: 37992177 PMCID: PMC10664986 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3142] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/19/2023] [Accepted: 10/20/2023] [Indexed: 11/24/2023]
Abstract
Investigation into the nexus of human-environmental behavior has seen increasing collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and paleo-scientists. However, many studies still lack interdisciplinarity and overlook incompatibilities in spatiotemporal scaling of environmental and societal data and their uncertainties. Here, we argue for a strengthened commitment to collaborative work and introduce the "dahliagram" as a tool to analyze and visualize quantitative and qualitative knowledge from diverse disciplinary sources and epistemological backgrounds. On the basis of regional cases of past human mobility in eastern Africa, Inner Eurasia, and the North Atlantic, we develop three dahliagrams that illustrate pull and push factors underlying key phases of population movement across different geographical scales and over contrasting periods of time since the end of the last Ice Age. Agnostic to analytical units, dahliagrams offer an effective tool for interdisciplinary investigation, visualization, and communication of complex human-environmental interactions at a diversity of spatiotemporal scales.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Michael Frachetti
- Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, CB 1114, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
- School of Cultural Heritage, Northwest University, Xi’an, China
| | - Nicola Di Cosmo
- Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
| | - Jan Esper
- Department of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg University, Becherweg 21, 55099 Mainz, Germany
- Global Change Research Institute (CzechGlobe), Czech Academy of Sciences, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic
| | - Lamya Khalidi
- Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, CEPAM, 24 avenue des Diables Bleus, 06300 Nice, France
| | - Franz Mauelshagen
- Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
| | - Clive Oppenheimer
- Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK
| | - Eleonora Rohland
- Department of History, University of Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
| | - Ulf Büntgen
- Global Change Research Institute (CzechGlobe), Czech Academy of Sciences, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic
- Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK
- Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL), 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Abstract
An enduring debate in the field of Arctic archaeology has been the extent to which climate change impacted cultural developments in the past. Long-term culture change across the circumpolar Arctic was often highly dynamic, with episodes of rapid migration, regional abandonment, and—in some cases—the disappearance or wholesale replacement of entire cultural traditions. By the 1960s, researchers were exploring the possibility that warming episodes had positive effects on cold-adapted premodern peoples in the Arctic by ( a) reducing the extent of sea ice, ( b) expanding the size and range of marine mammal populations, and ( c) opening new waterways and hunting areas for marine-adapted human groups. Although monocausal climatic arguments for change are now regarded as overly simplistic, the growing threat of contemporary Arctic warming to Indigenous livelihoods has given wider relevance to research into long-term culture–climate interactions. With their capacity to examine deeper cultural responses to climate change, archaeologists are in a unique position to generate human-scale climate adaptation insights that may inform future planning and mitigation efforts. The exceptionally well-preserved cultural and paleo-ecological sequences of the Arctic make it one of the best-suited regions on Earth to address such problems. Ironically, while archaeologists employ an exciting and highly promising new generation of methods and approaches to examine long-term fragility and resilience in Arctic social-ecological systems, many of these frozen paleo-societal archives are fast disappearing due to anthropogenic warming.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Sean P.A. Desjardins
- Arctic Centre and the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, University of Groningen, 9718 CW Groningen, The Netherlands;,
| | - Peter D. Jordan
- Arctic Centre and the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, University of Groningen, 9718 CW Groningen, The Netherlands;,
| |
Collapse
|