Archaeology Research

A new paper has just been published on developing transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability challenges, co-authored by Prof Nicki Whitehouse, in the journal Sustainability. 

The paper argues that the long-term study of human-environment interactions is essential for understanding the long term effects of how human activities are impacting on the evolution of our ecosystems. There are, however, a number of key challenges faced when integrating long-term datasets with those of other areas of sustainability science.

The authors argue that, firstly, the role of historical sciences should not simply be to furnish additional case studies, but to use these as a source of evidence for understanding the core underlying mechanisms of socio-environmental interactions over the longue durée. The aim therefore should be to use the longue durée to identify and understand the underlying human-ecological dynamics that are otherwise hidden by the shorter duration of individual case studies. One of the first steps is to transform individual case studies into consistent and comparable time-series, in itself a far from trivial exercise. 

A second issue is how to conceptualize the role of humans in socio-ecological systems. Many of the theoretical frameworks applied to understanding human–environment relationships have converged on a position that considers all components of ecosystems, whether human or ‘non-human’, in a non-hierarchical way, without separating humans out as exceptional or artificially distinct from their wider environments. Overwhelmingly, humans are seen as inherently entangled with, and not distinct from other aspects of, the environment. Such a perspective is fundamental to developing work on socio-ecological systems in the historical sciences. Exactly how much weight is accorded to human activity in any specific context is likely to vary depending on the research question, but de-centering humans is an important step towards enabling a dynamic, transdisciplinary approach that allows for the integration of key theoretical trends across the entirety of the humanities/sciences spectrum. 

In order to deal with these complex problems, the paper proposes that formal computational modelling is the ideal platform to overcome the challenges of transdisciplinary work across large, and multiple, geographical and temporal scales, with a goal of providing a manifesto for an integrated scientific approach to the study of socio-ecological systems over the long term. Because computational modelling is formalized as algebraic equations or programming code, and often outputs graphics and statistics that summarize key results, it acts as a common language that transcends disciplinary boundaries and allows for multidirectional communication of research hypotheses, results, and inferred narratives.

The paper may be read here on Open Access.

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First published: 18 August 2022