ENV 330 - Environmental Archaeology

Credits: 3 Prerequisite: Instructor consent required. Long-term sustainability requires that we look not only ahead to the future, but back to the past. How did past societies interact with their environments? How did people in the past respond to environmental challenges? What can we learn from their responses to address the challenges we face today? This class applies a long-term perspective to human environment relationships using approaches drawn from archaeology and the environmental humanities. We focus on three major practices contributing to the environmental challenges of the 21st century - industrial agriculture, fossil fuel extraction, and deforestation - and use archaeology to understand how each of these practices developed over human history. Place-based learning through field trips are key in developing student engagement with environmental archaeological approaches throughout the course. Fisher.