Looking for the Future in the Past: Long-Term Change in Socioecological Systems

The archaeological record has been described as a key to the long-term consequences of human action that can help guide our decisions today. Yet the sparse and incomplete nature of this record makes it impossible to inferentially reconstruct past societies in sufficient detail for them to serve as more than very general cautionary tales of coupled human and natural systems. New methods of computational modeling can be used to fill in the many gaps in the archaeological record with quantitative estimates rather than subjective narratives. However, while providing more transparent and testable ways of reconstructing the past, it is not clear that such simulations can also serve as more reliable guides to future decisions than traditional narratives. However, when formal and computational modeling is used to experimentally simulate human socioecological dynamics, the empirical archaeological record can be used to validate and improve dynamic models of long term change. In this way, knowledge generated by archaeology can play a unique and valuable role in developing the tools to make more informed decisions that will shape our future. The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics project offers an example of using the past to develop and test computational models of interactions between land-use and landscape evolution that can ultimately may help guide decision-making.