Anthropocene: Shrug,engage,or do new sorts of work?

Abstract

In this article, I make some comparisons between approaches to the Anthropocene in archaeology and geography and use them to consider where to go from here. The Anthropocene has lacked purchase in archaeology due to three main disciplinary trends; the importance of process and contingency, the increasing importance of de-periodisation and the increasing critique of the universal human in human origins discussions. Each of these trends has an expression in geography but geographers have tended to critically engage while archaeologists have shrugged. The sense that we have all moved beyond the Anthropocene is a luxury challenged by three important convergences between recent scientific and social scientific thought: a much enhanced set of data about the variable specifics of human–environment relations, particularly across time; increasing recognition of the role of colonialism and capitalism in constituting not only the earth system changes but also the subjectivities and conceptualisation of the Anthropocene; the profound challenges of a transforming and transformable Earth. These convergences demand new and different sorts of work.

Keywords

Anthropocene archaeology geosocial climate change work periodisation colonial

I Shrugging at the Anthropocene?

As the search for the Anthropocene's golden spike continues, there is a huge disconnect between biophysical and social sciences approaches to the epoch and its surrounding discourse. On one hand the trope of the universal human is as strong as ever in discussions over the recent nomination of Ontario's Crawford Lake as the spike site (Carrington 2023; Voosen 2023), notwithstanding dissenting views on the Anthropocene Working Group (Castree 2023). On the other hand, perhaps ‘Anthropocenomania is finally waning’, as Astrida Neimanis declared in (2021, 7). If the Anthropocene's moment has passed, the reasons why still bear scrutiny and discussion. For Neimanis and colleagues who adopted the strategy of Hacking the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene imaginary cannot survive the weight of critique, but the questions fuelling those critiques remain pertinent:

Since when have (certain) humans not been destroying (certain) kinds of life on earth? Who does this imaginary make expendable, and what kinds of relations does it reify? (p. 7)

Certainly the amount of writing that engages, critiques and extends the Anthropocene is now many times larger than the canonical works that advanced the concept. It has generated conceptual and methodological challenges, not least how to engage with the ends of worlds and the beginnings of new ones. My path here through some of that literature starts with archaeology's ambivalent relationship with the Anthropocene, and some comparisons with geographic approaches.

II Archaeology and the Anthropocene

Archaeology provides an interesting disciplinary parallel to geography because of its interest in human–environmental relations in space and time, the bringing to bear of social, natural and physical science perspectives, and that both empirical and conceptual work are valued. Practitioners in both see their disciplines as highly relevant to addressing contemporary global challenges. Archaeology, like geography, is grappling to a greater or lesser extent with its disciplinary heritage in the crucible of ‘Western modernity, nationalism and imperialism’ (Porr and Matthews 2020a, 3). So I became interested to explore why the discipline of archaeology ‘has been one of the most peripheral to discussions on the Anthropocene’ (Bauer and Ellis 2018, 211).

Take for example a special issue of Journal of Contemporary Archaeology devoted to the Archaeology of the Anthropocene. The expectation that archaeology and the Anthropocene have many points of connection is expressed from a variety of perspectives, such as that archaeologists have been doing this work forever (‘the Anthropocene debate has come to us, has already moved onto our territory, and could even be said to be partly emerging from it’ (Edgeworth et al. 2014, 74)), and because of the Anthropocene's geological search for materially grounded evidence of human activity (‘If the anthropocene has objective reality, a material record of it must exist in the cuts, deposits, stratigraphic sequences, material residues and artifact assemblages that constitute archaeological evidence’ (Edgeworth et al. 2014, 76)). The papers in the Edgeworth collection offer both support for and critique of the Anthropocene, and express concerns with its implications for heritage and conservation issues. They critique the eurocentrism of the concept (Kelly in Edgeworth et al. 2014) and ask ‘what work does the image of the Anthropocene do; what kind of interventions does it foster, and what does it preclude?’ (Crossland in Edgeworth et al. 2014, 123). They engage with its material claims, for example Graves-Brown's (in Edgeworth et al. 2014) engagement with claims for increasing waste over time. They consider the human footprint in space (Gorman in Edgeworth et al. 2014).

These and other papers thus trace the contours of a debate in ways that are familiar to geographers. Archaeologists have engaged with various dating claims; for example Erlandson and Braje (2013) argued for a start date of 10,000BP. They advance the idea of critical hope (Hacıgüzeller 2021). For all the interest, the archaeological engagement feels a bit forced, and lacks an emergent disciplinary focus of its own. I see three connected reasons for this, that are also themes in the literature.

2.1. The importance of process and contingency

Archaeologists and palaeoecologists have been active in arguments about different dates for Anthropocene onset, often wanting to emphasise evidence for early and extensive human impacts on earth processes and landscapes as potential timeframes (e.g., Ruddiman 2003; Braje and Erlandson 2013; Ellis et al. 2013; Boivin et al. 2016). Yet for these authors and other colleagues, the dating debates can obscure more important discussions about impacts, processes, causal relationships, and evidence of variable and diachronic configurations of socio-environmental relations (Gale and Hoare 2012; Edgeworth et al. 2014; Bauer and Ellis 2018; Gonzalez-Ruibal 2018; Edgeworth 2021). In this context the strength and capacity of the Anthropocene concept to raise the alarm about the rate of global climate and environmental change can lead to a misdiagnosis of causal processes (Clark in Edgeworth et al. 2014). Although partly operating across different timeframes there are clear resonances here with geographical critiques that take up the issue of (mis)diagnosing of causal processes, for example Moore's (2015) analysis of capitalism as a key and constitutive driver.

2.2. The trend to de-periodisation

As archaeologists have worked hard over recent decades to understand these causal processes and the contingent diachronic assemblages that emerge from them, so they have in many ways dismantled periodisations that were often incorporated in progressivist and teleological fashion into geologic time scales and strata; the palaeolithic and neolithic to name just two.

My opening complaint, then, is that the notion of “the anthropocene” is too entirely overdetermined. It is intrinsically prejudicial. It is a concept literally determined to prejudge the issue between humanity and the Earth. (Clarke in Edgeworth et al. 2014, 10)

Because archaeological evidence is so heavily diachronous, it undermines the idea that the Anthropocene can have a precisely defined single date moment of onset, suggesting instead diachronous beginnings spread out through time. (Edgeworth 2021, 96)

I have argued previously that the rise of contingent and non-linear approaches in archaeology, and their critique of grand syntheses and metanarratives, can be applied to thinking about the Anthropocene (Head 2014). This is seen in unravelling monolithic categories such as ‘the Neolithic’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’. In the long human history of Australia, for example, both Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological evidence suggest a ‘past comprising a mosaic of independent cultural trajectories based on continuous adjustments’ (Ulm 2013, 189) to local physical and social conditions (Hiscock 2008).

Bauer and Ellis (2018, 209) call the periodisation ‘the Anthropocene divide’:

Strident debate about the Anthropocene's chronological boundaries arises because its periodization forces an arbitrary break in what is a long-enduring process of human alterations of environments… Thus, the Anthropocene periodization, what we term the “Anthropocene divide,” obscures rather than clarifies understandings of human–environmental relationships.

Some of this discussion ends up at cross-purposes, as it is clear that geologists do not see ‘clarifying understandings of human–environmental relationships’ as their core mission. For example, responding to Bauer and Ellis, Zalasiewicz and colleagues argue:

Earth system scientists find such “periodization” exceptionally useful because it provides a consistent way to discern and communicate significant changes in the structure and functioning of the Earth system from a very large amount of useful data, including data from archaeology and anthropology. (Zalasiewicz et al. 2018, 220)

Note however that other geologists take issue with the importance of periodisation even in geology: ‘The Geologic Time Scale was a triumph of nineteenth century scientific endeavor but has been rendered largely obsolete by the advent of radiometric dating’ (Kaplan 2018, 218).

This is not to say that periodisations have no utility, nor have been completely abandoned in archaeology. But where periodisation has been defended by archaeologists in relation to the Anthropocene, it is more in relation to the political utility of the term than the value to the discipline. For example González-Ruibal (2018) argues for an archaeologically defined ‘Age of Destruction’ to parallel the Anthropocene. His argument is that such a periodisation has political potential to highlight the destruction wrought by modernity and capitalism, implicitly in contrast to nuanced elaborations of social and ecological processes that might obscure the urgency and depth of contemporary crises.

Rolled into the periodisation issue are the paradoxical implications of the Anthropocene for the Holocene. If the only really exceptional thing about the Holocene, compared to previous warmer and wetter (interglacial) periods within the long span of the Pleistocene, is the scale and impact of human activities across the globe – agriculture, sedentary communities, cities and infrastructures then, as Certini and Scalenghe (2015) argue, the Holocene was already the Anthropocene.

2.3. The universal human

A major theme in the critique of the Anthropocene has been the universalist species-level claims of the anthropos (Haraway 2015; Moore 2015; Head 2016). This theme plays out in archaeology in discussions of the deep time of human sociocultural evolution, and the emergence of modern human behaviour (Fox, Pope and Ellis 2017; Porr and Matthews 2020b). (Care is needed here of universalist claims about disciplines; Porr and Matthews (2020a, 4) are critiquing the failure of their own discipline to come to terms with some of its own significant theoretical developments.)

Porr and Matthews (2020a) critique universalist, essentialist and western claims about humanity's past, noting the ‘tension between human unity and universality on the one hand and local cultural variability and difference on the other’ (p. 7). Drawing on Landau's (1991) and Stoczkowski's (2002) work on narratives, they argue that the building blocks of the modern Western ontology, including environmental determinism, materialism, utilitarianism and individualism, ‘have structured recent views of so-called modern human origins in a problematic and universalising fashion’ (Porr and Matthews 2020a, 12). An important element in Landau's analysis was the hero narrative, ‘which presents human evolution as a mastery of successive challenges leading towards an ultimate goal. Invariably, the latter is Western civilisation,’ (Porr and Matthews 2020a, 20).

Such perspectives ‘almost necessarily create… a progressive understanding of human history that is characterised by a movement out of or emancipation from nature’ (Porr and Matthews 2020a, 20). Here they connect to Anderson and Perrin's (2018) work on historicising the human. Anderson and Perrin show how human exceptionalism has persisted beyond Christian and Cartesian notions of the mind/body dualism through the historicity of a human defined by physicality – walking upright, large brained, two handed – as drawn from archaeological and evolutionary evidence. The associated risk is that the Anthropocene ‘potentially naturalizes a recent state shift as a teleological outcome of human evolution’ (Bauer and Ellis 2018, 224).

III Stratigraphy of an idea, and its colonial heritage

The periodisation discussed above, and Anderson and Perrin's (2018) injunction to keep historicising our categories, also applies to the idea of the Anthropocene, and its precursors. Simpson (2020) describes himself as:

Much like the stratigrapher who traces the geological record in search of insights into the history of the present, I take an archeological approach to the history of this idea, tracing its development through its various antecedents and previous formations. (2020, 55) (see also Larsen and Harrington 2021)

Simpson (2020, 61) notes that Anthropocene pioneers Crutzen and Stoermer have acknowledged their debt to the two mid-twentieth century Wenner-Gren symposia resulting in the massive edited geographical classics Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth and The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, ‘as well as the [earlier] ideas of Stoppani, Marsh, Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin’. Simpson identified three Eurocentric themes in these works:

‘the narrative about the gradual progression of human cultures through different stages of advancement and development’. (p. 61)

‘the contention that, at some stage along this trajectory of human development, human cultures step out of a state of Nature or savagery and into a state of Civilization. These states of “savagery” and “civilization” are distinguished by a society's relationship to the nonhuman world’. (p. 62)

‘this entire process of the development of human culture through the various identified historical stages is presented as having a teleological trajectory’. (p. 63)

Simpson argues that all three tropes are seen in key Anthropocene texts such as Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill's (2007) article titled “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” It is relevant also that the Wenner-Gren symposia were themselves part of the post-war emergence of globalised science, e.g., through the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58.

Inescapable in both archaeology and geography is the legacy of western thought and colonialism, hence Simpson (2020) and many others have called to destabilise Anthropocene stories framed in colonial narratives (Davis and Todd 2017; Verges 2017; Davis et al. 2019; Sultana 2022). The historicisation of science may still be news to some parts of a geological audience who maintain the separation of their scientific debates from the broader social discourse we might think of as hashtag Anthropocene. Nevertheless there are strong points of connection, such as Lewis and Maslin's persuasive location of the timing of Anthropocene onset, based on scientific evidence, in the colonisation of the Americas (Lewis and Maslin 2018).

Indigenous scholars have been contesting the colonialist framing of the Anthropocene for some time (Davis and Todd 2017; Whyte 2017, 2018), pointing out that many of the elements of the crisis narrative have already been experienced by their societies in the process of colonial violence and associated ecosystem collapse. For them, to consider the risks of a move from stability to crisis is to deal with history rather than to think about the future. Of particular interest, when juxtaposed against discussions above of human origins, is Whyte's critique of approaches that ‘trade in narratives of finality and last-ness that privilege the concept of change as a concept describing movement or transition from stability to crisis – where crisis signals an impending end’ (2018, 236). Connected to this is the narrative ‘that Indigeneity (of a certain kind) primarily resides in the Holocene’ (2018, 236). While careful not to downplay the disruption and harm of current times, Whyte is anxious not to do this in a way that invokes these narratives of finality.

The openings that might be possible against such narratives of finality are considered further in the concluding section of this article. As Yusoff (2013) argues, thinking of a futurity without fossil fuels ‘requires undoing forms of becoming that are coconstituted with fossil fuels, as much as reconstituting alternative energetic materialities’ (p. 792). Yusoff's thinking takes us further into the coconstitution of race and geology over time, arguing for:

Blackness as a historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy. (Yusoff 2018, xii)

Developing the concept of the inhumanities (Yusoff 2021), Yusoff examines the ‘traffic between the inhuman as matter and the inhuman as race’ (2018, 5) that developed in the colonial history of the New World. As we see in the next section, ‘the classification of the inhuman as inert, ahistorical, non-political, inorganic’ (Yusoff 2018, 72) is itself a biopolitical act with significant consequences.

IV The implications of the volatile and transformable Earth

Let us step back a bit now and concentrate on the implications of the volatile and transformable Earth. This is one of the key paradoxes of the Anthropocene; the breadth and depth of human activities and influence have exerted tremendous power over earth system processes, to the point where these processes may exceed human power to control them (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 2007; Head 2008; Richardson et al. 2023). In triggering moves towards irreversible thresholds (Lenton et al. 2019; Armstrong McKay et al. 2022), human influences take us to conditions beyond the apparent reach of social agency. Key thinkers here are social scientists who have thought deeply about how planetary processes such as volcanism exceed the social (Clark 2011; Clark and Yusoff 2017; Clark and Szerszynski 2021).

Clark and Szerszynski are critical of the response of social thought to the Anthropocene, particularly the ‘militant reassertion of the authority of the social sciences to define, differentiate and diagnose the human condition’ (2021, 42). They focus on a dimension of the Anthropocene that is much less discussed in the social sciences and humanities than the way we conceptualise the anthropos; the rapid (and terrifying) shift of the earth system into a very different state. They try to help us think the unthinkable; ‘what if it started raining and didn’t let up for a million years?’ (p. 4) or, more prosaically, ‘the sense that the earthly conditions we are used to are unstable and could change rapidly enough to impinge significantly on everyday life’ (p. 7). They see the value in the Anthropocene as offering us ‘a language or grammar for thinking about the Earth as a system that – in its entirety – is capable of going through a transition, and doing this rapidly’ (p. 9), ‘to become something other than it is’ (p. 20, emphasis in original). ‘The anthropos is not one, as critical social thinkers are keen to remind geoscientists. But as geoscientists… might now reply, neither is the earth’ (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 18).

Obviously there are big challenges here for western social thought that has been built for a stable earth. Interpretations vary about how much these challenges derive from the experience of actual planetary inertia. For Palsson and Swanson (2016), deep assumptions about the ‘asocial nature of stone’ (p. 152) developed in western Europe during periods of geologic quiescence, while Clark and Yusoff (2017) argue that ‘the decisive stilling of the earth in social and philosophical thought’ (p. 4) was actually a response to evidence of violent earth upheavals. Space precludes detailed engagement with these discussions but, coming forward to the twentieth century, the earth of the longue duree remains a product of mid-century gradualist orthodoxy (Clark and Yusoff 2017).

Clark and Yusoff drew on the work of historian John Brooke (2014) who charted the move away from gradualism and towards neocatastrophism (or post-gradualism) in the earth sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. The years 1966–1973 alone saw the emergence of four major new perspectives on the dynamics of the Earth:

confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics, the thesis that biological evolution is punctuated by catastrophic bursts linked to major geophysical events, a new appreciation of the role of extra-terrestrial impacts in earth history, and the idea that the different components of the earth function as an integrated system (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 10)

Note also the strong links between conceiving of the geo elements of the social, and the scientific approaches that are themselves disrupting the geo/bio dualism by for example exploring the deep history of the Anthropocene biosphere (Williams et al. 2015). ‘In short, there is not, and could never be, a clear date at which humans became “geophysical.” To be biological is also to be geophysical’ (Bauer and Ellis 2018, 214).

Iceland provides one telling example of geosocialities (Palsson and Swanson 2016). Here a number of elements of the Anthropocene – global capitalism, the molten core of the earth and melting glaciers – are juxtaposed in space and time as modernity's ruins (Huijbens 2021). It is the place where the funeral for the glacier Ok was held in 2019. Huijbens focuses on islandness as a way to ‘come to terms with our geographically specific earthly entanglements’ (p. 89), but it is a very particular sort of island; an emergent oceanic island where ‘society becomes connected to the rising mantle plume’ (p. 99) via its hot water infrastructure among other things. Iceland is presented here as a geosocial formation, after Clark and Yusoff (2017), where the earth ‘punch[es] through’ and ‘mountains shrug’ (p. 90), and the geothermal power of that emergence is increasingly utilised for hot water and tourism. Huijbens describes the tourist drawcards Blue Lagoon and Námaskarð as ‘debris-strewn environmental ruins of modernizing projects, both tapping a resource that is unsustainable in the long run and unreliable in the short run’ (p. 98).

Palsson and Swanson (2016) make the important point that within Anthropocene debates, the geologic has too often been rendered synonymous with the planetary in its efforts to focus attention on changes in earth systems. (p. 154). They ‘imagine more multiscalar framings of the geos that may help us move beyond the unproductive juxtaposition of “global” earth systems and “local” human differences’ (p. 155), using the example of the battle with the lava from the volcano Helgafell in the Westman Islands in 1973. (This flow crushed the house Palsson grew up in.) The story of how the townsfolk pumped sea water at the flowing lava, slowing its flow and solidifying it into a geologically anomalous water-hardened stone, continues to be celebrated each July. The story is used by Palsson and Swanson to ‘intertwine biographies and planetary systems in ways that challenge our sense of what is “big” and “small”’ (p. 164).

As I have written elsewhere (Head 2022), there is a risk of re-naturalising environmental change, as the impacts of climate change and environmental hazards are exacerbated and become more visible. In Australia, for example, politicians have long been adept at blaming nature for things they could influence, but in the last few years we have seen the re-emergence of Mother Nature as the guilty party in the face of devastating floods and fires. The challenges of planetary social thought may make our head hurt, but that's even more reason why political analyses must be brought to bear.

V What kinds of work to do?

I have outlined here three connected reasons why the Anthropocene concept has not attained great purchase in archaeology; the importance in that discipline of process and contingency, its trend to de-periodisation and the increasing critique of the universal human in human origins discussions. Each of these themes takes expression in geography but, to generalise, geographers have tended to critically engage while archaeologists have shrugged. Pushing ourselves beyond both such reactions, how can we think better about what kinds of work to do now? Schmidt has recently cautioned that ‘more ethical perspicuity is needed than complaints that human impacts on the Earth are not the result of humanity writ large’ (2022, 1087). He argues that, in contesting the Anthropocene canon, it is important not to centre positions privileged enough to walk away.

I argue that the first kind of work is to articulate the main convergences between scientific and social scientific thought that have survived the blizzard of discussion over the last decade or so. These are threaded through this article and I summarise them here. First, there is a much enhanced set of data (from geography, archaeology, palaeoecology, history) about the variable specifics of human–environment relations in space and time (Braje and Erlandson 2013; Boivin et al. 2016; Bauer and Ellis 2018). Second, there is increasing recognition of the role of capitalist colonialism (or colonial capitalism – I have not gone into the differing perspectives on key drivers here) in constituting not only the earth system changes and the subjectivities of modernity and the Anthropocene, but also the way we have recently debated the conceptualisation of the Anthropocene (Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2015; Lewis and Maslin 2018). Third, the challenges of a transforming and transformable Earth are profound and yet to be fully grappled with (Clark and Szerszynski 2021; Folke et al. 2021). These convergences provide strong grounds for future collaborative research.

A second kind of work lies in using the deep time history of human–environment entanglements to more creatively bring alternative futures into being. In their thoughtful engagement with the scalar dimensions of the geosocial, Palsson and Swanson (2016) enjoin us to ‘bold thinking rather than merely big thinking’ (p. 167). Bold work rather than merely big work is seen in many contemporary approaches; hacked, speculative, collaborative, experimental, improvisational, anti-colonial, relational, artistic, aesthetic, pluralist, caring (Todd 2015; Clark and Yusoff 2017; Daigle 2018; Hernández et al. 2020; Bennett 2021; Brown and Kanouse 2021; Cumpston 2021; Hamilton et al. 2021; Waters et al. 2023). The enhanced data sets of human–environment relations through the deep time of human history can be mobilised not to argue about the periodisation of the Anthropocene but to become part of Clark and Szerszynski's (2021) ‘earthly multitudes’ that provide the basis for future experimentation. Or as Huijbens puts it (2021, 92), ‘I do not see the Anthropocene as the tragic end, but as a particular set of ruins that can be negotiated for their potential’. We may be tired, but we have only just begun.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lesley Head

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