ABSTRACT
The Paris Agreement on climate change—signed on 22nd April 2016 by over 170 states and other entities—binds, in section 2(a), its ratifying parties to ‘pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’ (already perhaps a vain hope; Huntingford and Mercado 2016). Yet, at the time of writing, only 22 countries have ratified the Agreement. Many of these ratifying parties are Pacific and Indian Ocean island nations facing existential threat in the face of climate change-induced sea level rise. The plight of low-lying islands exemplifies and underscores the massive changes being wrought to the physical systems of the planet by the series of processes implied by the term ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The relationship between islands, their environments, and the capacity of our species to radically alter the physical organization of the planet’s surface, peculiarly exemplary as it may be in the present, might, however, have a deeper antiquity. This chapter will consider what nuances a perspective offered by island archaeology may bring to our understanding of the Anthropocene. It also argues that—because of their singular environmental organization—islands have, throughout the late Quaternary, been unusually exposed to anthropogenic biophysical change in a manner which has salutary effects for a broader understanding of human ecodynamics.
