By Erle C. Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems, UMBC; Ben Marwick, associate professor of archaeology, University of Washington; Lucas Stephens, research affiliate in archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History; and Nicole Boivin, director of the department of archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Examples of how human societies are changing the planet abound – from building roads and houses, clearing forests for agriculture and digging train tunnels, to shrinking the ozone layer, driving species extinct, changing the climate and acidifying the oceans. Human impacts are everywhere. Our societies have changed Earth so much that it’s impossible to reverse many of these effects.

Some researchers believe these changes are so big that they mark the beginning of a new “human age” of Earth history, the Anthropocene epoch. A committee of geologists has now proposed to mark the start of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, based on a striking indicator: the widely scattered radioactive dust from nuclear bomb tests in the early 1950s.

But this is not the final word.

Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch.

Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world. For example, the first instances of agriculture emerged at different places at different times, and resulted in huge impacts on the environment, through land clearing, habitat losses, extinctions, erosion and carbon emissions, forever changing the global climate.

If there are multiple beginnings, scientists need to answer more complicated questions – like when did agriculture begin to transform landscapes in different parts of the world? This is a tough question because archaeologists tend to focus their research on a limited number of sites and regions and to prioritize locations where agriculture is believed to have appeared earliest. To date, it has proved nearly impossible for archaeologists to put together a global picture of land use changes throughout time.

Global answers from local experts

To tackle these questions, we pulled together a research collaboration among archaeologists, anthropologists and geographers to survey archaeological knowledge on land use across the planet.

We asked over 1,300 archaeologists from around the world to contribute their knowledge on how ancient people used the land in 146 regions spanning all continents except Antarctica from 10,000 years ago right up to 1850. More than 250 responded, representing the largest expert archaeology crowdsourcing project ever undertaken, though some prior projects have worked with amateur contributions.

Our work has now mapped the current state of archaeological knowledge on land use across the planet, including parts of the world that have rarely been considered in previous studies.

We used a crowdsourcing approach because scholarly publications don’t always include the original data needed to allow global comparisons. Even when these data are shared by archaeologists, they use many different formats from one project to another, making it difficult to combine for large-scale analysis. Our goal from the beginning was to make it easy for anyone to check our work and reuse our data – we’ve put all our research materials online where they can be freely accessed by anyone.

Earlier and more widespread human impacts

Though our study acquired expert archaeological information from across the planet, data were more available in some regions – including Southwest Asia, Europe, northern China, Australia and North America – than in others. This is probably because more archaeologists have worked in these regions than elsewhere, such as parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.

Our archaeologists reported that nearly half (42%) of our regions had some form of agriculture by 6,000 years ago, highlighting the prevalence of agricultural economies across the globe. Moreover, these results indicate that the onset of agriculture was earlier and more widespread than suggested in the most common global reconstruction of land-use history, the History Database of the Global Environment. This is important because climate scientists often use this database of past conditions to estimate future climate change; according to our research it may be underestimating land-use-associated climate effects.

Our survey also revealed that hunting and foraging was generally replaced by pastoralism (raising animals such as cows and sheep for food and other resources) and agriculture in most places, though there were exceptions. In a few areas, reversals occurred and agriculture did not simply replace foraging but merged with it and coexisted side by side for some time.

The deep roots of the Anthropocene

Global archaeological data show that human transformation of environments began at different times in different regions and accelerated with the emergence of agriculture. Nevertheless, by 3,000 years ago, most of the planet was already transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists.

To guide this planet toward a better future, we need to understand how we got here. The message from archaeology is clear. It took thousands of years for the pristine planet of long ago to become the human planet of today.

And there is no way to fully understand this human planet without building on the expertise of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and other human scientists. To build a more robust Earth science in the Anthropocene, the human sciences must play as central a role as the natural sciences do today.

Disclosure statement

Ben Marwick receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Geographic Society

Erle C. Ellis received funding from the National Science Foundation for this project under grant CNS 1125210. He is a fellow of the Global Land Program, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute. He is a member of the American Association of Geographers.

Lucas Stephens receives funding from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Senior Research Analyst at the Environmental Law and Policy Center and a Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Nicole Boivin receives funding from the Max Planck Society. She is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, and a Research Affiliate at the Smithsonian Institution and University of Calgary.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Preminda Jacob, visual arts, has been named the new associate dean of research and community engagement for UMBC’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CAHSS). She will join the current team of associate deans in providing support for the College’s many departments, programs, and research centers. Together they will continue to implement CAHSS’ strategic goals and objectives, focusing on projects around recruitment and retention of diverse faculty, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and further developing community engagement work. 

Scott Casper, dean of CAHSS, is excited about the level of expertise Jacob brings to the team. “Preminda Jacob brings a wealth of experience as a scholar, teacher, and UMBC citizen, and leader to the Dean’s Office,” says Casper. “I am delighted that she has joined our leadership team and look forward to her continued contributions to the College and the University in this new role.”

Engaging faculty

Jacob will begin by joining the team of associate deans in working to further foster the current research community within CAHSS and build broader awareness of CAHSS research. One way Jacob hopes to share faculty research is by collaborating with campus partners on updating the university’s current faculty research database capabilities. This digital tool will help academics, researchers, educators, and students from around the world more easily access information about UMBC researchers and their areas of study.

“I see part of community engagement as an accessibility issue,” explains Jacob. “UMBC faculty conduct top-level research. A searchable database elevates our commitment to provide research-based answers to the world’s most pressing questions by placing the research within everyone’s reach.”

Jacob will also help faculty better connect with each other across departments, including for research that involves community partnerships. She looks forward to working with faculty who have research expertise on community engagement by exploring topics through existing brown bag lunch series and working groups in the five CAHSS research centers as well as across UMBC’s colleges. 

Engaging the community

Prior to joining the Dean’s Office, Jacob served as chair of visual arts from 2015 to 2018. As a professor of visual arts specializing in art history and visual culture, she worked to connect her passions for research and community engagement.

Jacob recalls a four-year partnership between the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Catonsville and her Space, Place, and Public Art class as a particularly significant collaboration. Jacob partnered students with the museum’s staff to create public art pieces from start to finish in one semester. “Students were excited to work directly with a local organization and leaders within the organizations were equally excited to serve as guides and mentors in the process,” she says. 

Over the years, Jacob’s students have created object and wall labels, interactive and interpretive recordings, and works of art for the museum. They produced a video featuring interviews with local leaders and archaeologists talking about the archaeological dig conducted by the Maryland Historical Trust in the 1980s on Benjamin Banneker’s property.

Victor Pineda ‘15, visual arts, who went on to serve as a museum intern after participating in Jacob’s class, helped record an actor’s interpretation of the voice of Benjamin Banneker. The recording became part of an interactive device in the Banneker Gallery. Today, visitors can listen to Benjamin Banneker discuss his letter to Thomas Jefferson. 

“Through the museum’s partnership with the visual arts department at UMBC,” says Willa Banks, the museum’s former director of education and curatorial affairs, “Dr. Jacob’s public art class provided a phenomenal service that not only benefited UMBC faculty and students but also the museum and the general public as well.”

Jacob plans to work with faculty already engaged with community partners in the Baltimore region to amplify relationships like this one. She is also dedicated to opening pathways for new community engagement opportunities, in the greater Baltimore region and beyond. 

Banner Image: Preminda at MFA celebration. All images by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC with the exception of the images of student work at the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum which were courtesy of Willa Banks.