Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988 to provide governments with policy-relevant assessments of climate science as well as options for adaptation and mitigation. It is now recognized as providing the leading global compilation of climate science, adaptation, and mitigation research. The volunteer scientists who write these reports have carried out five complete assessment cycles, with the sixth cycle to be completed in 2022. Here, we review how information from and about archaeology and other forms of cultural heritage has been incorporated into these reports to date. Although this review shows that archaeology has not been wholly absent from work of the IPCC, we suggest that archaeology has more to offer the IPCC and global climate response. We propose five ways to more fully engage both archaeologists and knowledge from and about the human past in IPCC assessments and reports.
Highlights
Can we clearly demonstrate that some aspect of climate has changed—for example, that a particular dimension is beyond the variability experienced in the recent past at some defined level of likelihood? The definition of “attribution”—a concept more aligned with WGII interests—is straightforward: “Attribution is . . . the process of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with an assignment of statistical confidence” (Agard and Schipper 2014:1763; emphasis added)
Even when instances of historical and industrial archaeology are brought to bear, the links between how archaeology approaches and understands the past and the specificity desired of science to inform contemporary policy are too weak
Our purpose in this article is to provide a firmer basis for addressing such concerns and for strengthening the links between archaeology and climate science
Summary
Over its three decades of existence, the work of the IPCC has become more inclusive of Indigenous knowledge and experience. It is clear that the sorts of verbal arguments that archaeologists often use to build cases for causal relationships are less likely to be assessed by IPCC readers as demonstrating causation with high confidence than are arguments that use formal statistical [Vol 85, No 4, 2020 machinery whose probability of error can be read directly This is a critical point for archaeology: we cannot be taken seriously by other scientists if they do not judge our causal arguments to be credible.
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