Archaeology’s Deep Time Perspective on Environment and Social Sustainability

This free presentation by archaeologist Allen Dart, which is sponsored by Arizona Humanities and the Pima County Public Library, will be held on Saturday, January 23, 2016 from 11:00 to noon at the Joel Valdez Main Library (101 N. Stone Ave., Tucson). The deep time perspective that archaeology and related disciplines provide about natural hazards, environmental change, and human adaptation not only is a valuable supplement to historical records, it sometimes contradicts historical data used by modern societies to make decisions affecting social sustainability and human safety. What can be learned from scientific evidence that virtually all prehistoric farming cultures in Arizona and the Southwest eventually surpassed their thresholds of sustainability, leading to collapse or reorganization of their societies? Could the disastrous damages to nuclear power plants damaged by the Japanese tsunami of 2011 have been avoided if the engineers who decided where to build those plants had not ignored evidence of prehistoric tsunamis? This presentation looks at archaeological, geological, and sustainable-agricultural evidence on environmental changes and how human cultures have adapted to those changes, and discusses the value of a “beyond history” perspective for modern society. For more information contact librarian Matt Landon at 520-594-5565 or matt.landon@pima.gov or contact Allen Dart at 520-798-1201 or adart@oldpueblo.org.Photo of centuries-old Hohokam Indian checkdams on Tumamoc Hill, Tucson, AZ.