How can archaeology contribute to an ecologically sustainable future?
In a paper published in the open access journal PLOS ONE titled Anthropological contributions to historical ecology: 50 questions, infinite prospects REAL project members Anna Shoemaker, Nik Petek and Paul Lane explore this issue. The paper presents the result of crowd-sourcing hundreds of key questions for historical ecology from researchers around the world. Workshops were held at Uppsala University and Simon Fraser University to discuss the submissions and identify 50 priority research topics.
Historical ecologists are a diverse community of scholars dedicated to bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences because as first author Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University explains “issues like climate change are not just ecological problems – they are social ones.” Read more about Chelsey and Anna’s thoughts on the paper here.