Environment, climate and people: Exploring human responses to climate change

•The archaeology of climate change must.•Improve chronological controls on archaeological and environmental data;•Downscale climate data to local and microlocal effects in high-resolution studies;•Generate multi-proxy archaeological data analyses, avoiding single variable reporting in favor of multiple sources of precisely dated archaeological evidence;•Engage with up-to-date high-quality theory on social vulnerability and human responses to climate and environmental change;•Specify the threats, magnitude, and predictability of climate impacts in the context of traditional environmental knowledge; and.•Look at change before, during and after the climate impact. In 2004, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology published Julie Field’s “Environmental and climatic considerations: a hypothesis for conflict and the emergence of social complexity in Fijian prehistory”, where she combined climate and environmental data to investigate the relationship between social patterns of change in the context of variability. Field tackled a complex issue: how societies respond to climate and environmental change that could cause unpredictable impacts on subsistence and settlement systems. Much progress has been made towards the understanding of human adaptations or responses to climate change since that paper was published. Here I reflect on the issues put forth by Field and consider how archaeology can engage with other interdisciplinary sciences and contribute to the understanding of human responses to environmental change. Two topics are emphasized: climate and environmental change, and social behavior in the context of that change. When attempting to identify how climate change affects a society, it is necessary to downscale climate to the specific location in consideration (space) during the time-period during which the relevant society lived (time) and in the context of their past experiences of climate (traditional knowledge). We face an unprecedented climate crisis and archaeology can contribute to the identification of solutions.