There’s an old saying: every story is about climate change, especially stories about climate change. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but some days it feels pretty plausible.
Over the last week, I’ve been slowly trying to get back into a more healthy habit of reading. I have a stack of stuff to read this spring for my classes and a stack of stuff to read for NDQ and The Digital Press, and this leaves me less time than I would like to try to read around in my fields. As a result, I’m going to try to focus some attention on article length works this winter and spring. I started this new strategy with three articles on top of my “to read” pile. They all happened to have some oblique relevance to the climate change narratives that are structuring so much reporting on our current cold snap.
Article the First
As soon as I saw the title “Fieldwork in an Increasingly Variable Climate: The Kites in Context Project 2023 Field Season” from the Journal of Field Archaeology, I knew that I wanted to read this article. The team of authors, Austin Chad Hill, Yorke M. Rowan, Ali Atallah Al-Hajj, Jennifer Feng, Joseph Harris, Blair Heidkamp, Morag M. Kersel, Megan Nishida and Amelie Schmücker, combine narrative with a photo essay to describe their experiences working in Jordan’s Black Desert during an exceptional rain event in the summer of 2023. They describe how two days of rain during the ordinarily dry summer months flooded their camp, disrupted their field work, and offered hints to how Neolithic groups managed to survive in now sparely inhabited Black Desert.
The archaeology of archaeology has fascinated me and I’m particularly interested in understanding how climate conditions will shape field work practices in the Mediterranean. As temperatures and climate variability increase in the Mediterranean summer months, the key time for foreign research projects to work in the region, one wonders whether climate change might work to decolonize archaeological field projects by disrupting the season colonialism of foreign projects.
Just to be clear, I’m not implying that the Kites in Context project is particularly colonial, but the dramatic story and photographs of their summer field work in 2023 makes it clear that climate change is already shaping their work.
Article the Second
Yesterday, I had a chance to chat with a reporter about the tensions between the need for workforce housing in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch and the surge in evictions that occurred during the boom decade of the early 21st century. The impetus for this discussion was a recent article by Carl Gershenson, Olivia Jin, Jacob Haas and Matthew Desmond in the journal Society & Natural Resources titled “Fracking Evictions: Housing Instability in a Fossil Fuel Boomtown.”
The article applies the concept of “resource curse” to domestic resource booms rather than formally colonized areas (typically in the global south). The notion of the resource curse posits that the presence of natural resources in a region actually slows economic growth in the longer term. Whether this is tied to deliberate strategies associated with the “development of under development” or the social byproduct of the “slow violence” associated with extractive industries more broadly is almost irrelevant. Gershenson not only argue evictions represent one way in which resource booms produce longer term social instability as evicted individuals often struggle to benefit from educational, employment, and health care opportunities even when the extraction of natural resources allows for greater investments in these areas. This largely follows Matthew Desmond’s work on evictions elsewhere.
Carl Gershenson and company demonstrate that evictions went from being an exceedingly rare phenomena in Williston in North Dakota prior to the oil boom to a regular occurrence. Moreover, they were able to suggest that long-time residents of North Dakota experience more evictions than new residents. This plausibly suggests that we should associate evictions with the rise in rents which impacted local residents — presumably on lower or fixed incomes — more than new comers to the region whose salaries were more commensurate with the increasing housing costs.
The most fascinating thing about this article was the graph that showed how evictions increased in lockstep with the rate of oil production. How cool is that?
Article the Third
Finally, I have really enjoyed dipping into Nikolas Bakirtzis and Luca Zavagno, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City: From Justinian to Mehmet II (ca. 500 – ca.1500). Zavagno’s historiographic survey of work on the Byzantine City from Late Antiquity to the Late Byzantine period is a must read for anyone trying to navigate the tension between the city as a type of settlement with certain characteristics recognizable across time and culture and the city as a historical phenomenon. In some ways, this tension mimics the tension between continuity and change so familiar to scholars of the Late Roman, Early Medieval, and Early Byzantine periods. In other ways, it’s much more challenging because drifting toward “the only constant is change” renders opaque how changes reflected new social, political, and religious realities; on the other hand, an essentialized view of the city pulls us toward ahistorical readings of past which are equally unsatisfying.
Zavagno shows how historians and archaeologists have threaded this needle over the last 30 years. Significant for the theme of this post is that growing interest in the relationship between the environment and the city with particular attention being given to water management. If we think about cities as a particular manifestation of the Holocene climatic optimum, then climate and the distinctive environment conditions it fostered and urbanism are inseparable. Zavagno’s survey doesn’t necessarily point to this issue specifically, but rather is suggestive that future work on the Byzantine city will not only have to take into account the long history of the Holocene while also pointing in new directions which shows how the Byzantine city can contribute to conversations about urbanism and climate change in the contemporary world.