April 8, 2024. By Christian Isendahl
What have people done, what were their goals and motivations, what were the consequences of this behavior over different spatial and temporal scales, and what can we learn from these examples? (Isendahl 2022, p. 239)
Archaeologists are increasingly recognizing that the data they produce, the knowledge they generate, and the theoretical perspectives that they employ can contribute unique insights towards understanding and addressing societal challenges in the present. Indeed, several core topics of archaeological analysis and interpretation—e.g., the emergence, dynamics, and diversity of social institutions, and how and why these change over time and with what unintentional intergenerational consequences—resonate profoundly with debates on sustainable development. The United Nations’ (2015) Agenda 2030 is the most important international charter and action plan towards sustainability transitions. The Agenda 2030 maps out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. The formulation of the SDGs represents an attempt by the global community to comprehensibly organize the most pervasive challenges that humanity currently is facing—poverty, hunger, ill health, pollution, conflict, inequalities, over-consumption, biodiversity-loss, global heating, etc. It is a frame of reference for complex and interconnected problems that need immediate attention and commitment in public policy and planning—and that require empirical research and critical theory to practically inform decision-making and behavioral recommendations. To say that there is an urgent need not only for radical action but also for new knowledge and novel ways of thinking to reach the SDGs is an understatement.
Archaeologists are regularly investigating the crucial issues of social and human–environmental relations that the SDGs identify, but they do so in past contexts and only rarely do they connect their research results and observations of processes, behaviors, and causalities to our present societal challenges. Similarly, research results are normally published in archaeological journals and jargon inaccessible to non-archaeologists. In other words, there is an underdeveloped potential for the archaeological discipline and profession to engage with societal challenges and to contribute practical insights towards sustainability transitions as detailed in the SDGs. Why, then, should the SDGs matter to archaeologists and the cultural heritage sector? A basic, empirical argument is that to address these complex and interconnected challenges the global community needs to draw from an as complete and multivariable body of evidence as possible, literally leaving no stone unturned that may reveal crucial insight. Archaeological research contributing to the SDGs may be summarized in three approaches (Isendahl and Stump 2019, p. 594):
- To generate case studies of phenomenas in the past that cannot be observed in the present.
- To inform phenomenas observed in the present by generating a greater sample of analogous case studies from the past.
- To detail processes acting out over long timescales (i.e., several centuries to millennia), and to expose how slow-changing variables interact with those with higher frequency oscillations.
The SDGs detail urgent issues for immediate action, but it remains the responsibility of archaeologists to transfer knowledge of the deeper past and make practical contributions to sustainable futures. Swedigarch is a research infrastructure that is building a practical toolkit to disseminate and access archaeological and cognate data generated from fieldwork and laboratory analyses, ultimately to support and enable knowledge production that addresses the SDGs. It aims to stimulate – by organizing lectures, seminars, workshops, field schools, boot camps, and charrettes and by highlighting best practice case studies – research that strengthen archaeology and cognate discipline’s societal impact to inform sustainability transitions. In other words, Swedigarch acts as a craft-maker, bringing together different primary materials, technologies, and people to meet a demand for transformative knowledge production and thinking.
References
Isendahl, Christian (2022) How Do We Get Out of This Mess? Landscape Legacies, Unintended Consequences, and Tradeoffs of Human Behavior. In Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond, edited by Jean T. Larmon, Lisa J. Lucero, and Fred Valdez Jr., 228–243. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Isendahl, Christian, and Daryl Stump (2019) Conclusion: Anthropocentric Historical
Ecology, Applied Archaeology, and the Future of a Useable Past. In The Oxford