ABSTRACT
Human societies have adapted to changing environments and long and short-term climate change since before the Ice Age began some 1.5 million years ago. This chapter describes some of the ways archaeologists study long- and short-term environmental change from a multidisciplinary perspective. It explains the major events of the Ice Age, then the Holocene, and also the major climatological approaches for studying them. The chapter discusses the impacts of El Niños and droughts on societies like the Moche of the Andes and the Ancestral Pueblo of the Southwest. Geoarchaeology is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of human adaptations that reconstructs ancient landscapes using such techniques as remote sensing and paleographic and biological methods such as pollen analysis. Palynology has obvious applications to prehistory, for sites are often found in swampy deposits where pollen is preserved, especially fishing or fowling camps and settlements near water.
