Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology

Abstract

The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage—all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. Archaeology can make a substantial contribution here. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the resilience concept in archaeology. Despite its ever-increasing relevance, resilience is still frequently understood within the framework of positivist approaches and branches of systems thinking that cannot capture our unfolding predicament and pay too little attention to the embodied historical asymmetries between more-than-human social worlds. This review identifies the potential for reformulations of resilience theory and its attendant concepts within a less positivistic and human-centered conceptual register. New translations of resilience in archaeology pave the way for more nuanced approaches to concepts of history and their sociopolitical use, as well as alternative time dynamics of historical change.