In December 2023, some 300 archaeologists from around the globe met in Shanghai, China, to recognize recent archaeological discoveries and to review what we know about the deep histories of humankind. Previous gatherings of the Shanghai Archaeology Forum happened in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. In 2015, ISAS won global recognition for its compliance-driven research on precolonial East St. Louis, a precinct of the Cahokia site, or Cahokia Mounds, that developed between the years 900–1350 C.E.
The focus of 2023’s forum was climate change and featured presentations on both ancient and modern climate impacts on cultural sites and heritage landscapes. No doubt about it, famous historic landmarks and ancient places are being dramatically and adversely affected the world over. I attended as a representative of North American archaeology. Few others who study precolonial histories in the United States and Canada did. What did they miss?
The main attractions of the Shanghai meeting were talks on a series of award-winning scientific projects infused with the latest lidar and AI technologies from Mexico, Turkey, Ukraine, Brazil, Cambodia, Greenland, and elsewhere. Presentations began with the jaw-dropping discoveries of Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona. He and his team have located and mapped with lidar (airborne laser scanning of the earth’s surface) the earliest Maya cities. Since finding them, he has now excavated and confirmed that they were built around 1200 B.C.E. on great rectangular platforms of sculpted earth covering a hundred or more acres. Radiating causeways and small surmounting pyramids were built in complicated patterns to connect people’s movements to the Maya calendar while also referencing periodic cosmic events—solar, lunar, and stellar rises and sets—witnessed by priests and citizens alike. At the moment, there is very little evidence of a social hierarchy.
Equally impressive are discoveries from Turkey of multiple ritual-residential hilltop sites dating to the late Paleolithic period 11,000 years ago, just at the end of the Ice Age. Finding the first of these, Göbekli Tepe, rocked the archaeological establishment a decade and a half ago. We now know that more such sites mark the very beginning of sedentary life in the Near East. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University showed these sites with their circular stone houses crowded around larger public and ceremonial versions with great stone pillars carved with presumed spirit beings that assumed animal and human form.
Urbanism, the Shanghai participants were reminded, took many different forms in different parts of the world at different times. Johannes Müeller of the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel showed his team’s recent excavations at one Iron-Age “mega-site” or city located in eastern Europe. Dating as early as 4100 B.C.E. in Ukraine and Romania, such sites consist of a series of concentric oval rings of houses and animal corrals. Called by archaeologists “the Trypillia culture,” its unique places cover less than 100 to more than 700 acres. These odd giant villages or small cities were home to hundreds to thousands of farmers and livestock.
Descendants of Trypillia farmers, along with all later Iron-Age peoples from Europe and Africa into Asia, had huge impacts on climate. In one fascinating study presented by Miljana Radivojevic of the University College London, data were presented that argued for the beginnings of the Anthropocene— the age of human-induced climate change we are in now— in the large-scale smelting of iron that began around some 4000 years ago in the Old World. In other presentations, speakers recognized the interconnectedness of human society with natural and climatic processes in ways sometimes called “posthumanism,” the principles of which were advocated in the early 1800s by Alexander von Humboldt.
Many at the meeting advocated for doing activist archaeology, where we not only learn lessons about climate change in the past but also work with Indigenous communities in the present for change through archaeology and heritage management. The most impressive advocate was Eduardo Neves of the University of São Paulo, who is attempting to locate significant archaeological sites in key parts of the Amazon to activate laws in Brazil that prevent the further destruction of such sites and, in the process, save the rainforest. Incredibly, his team and Indigenous partners are working across an area the size of the continental U.S. If successful, I teased him, Eduardo will become the archaeologist most likely to win a Nobel Prize.
And that’s where global archaeology is today, at least as seen at the Shanghai Archaeology Forum, leaving me and most attendees last December with the distinct impression that archaeology can and should take on global challenges involving the future of the planet. Cultural heritage matters, figuratively and literally, and Shanghai reminded me that many of the ongoing debates over artifacts, images, and museum displays in the United States seem rather petty compared to the real problem at hand. Archaeology in this country, in Illinois for instance, can and should be concerned with much bigger heritage-preservation concerns. We must work with fellow scientists, Tribal partners, curators, and politicians to save, not just interpret, cultural heritage.