A field archaeological perspective on the Anthropocene

Abstract

In a recent Antiquity debate, Todd Braje and respondents discuss the merits or otherwise of the recently proposed and hotly contested geological ‘Age of Man’—the Anthropocene. These papers make a useful contribution to the rapidly growing literature on this epoch-in-the-making (cf. Swanson et al. 2015). Recent publications by members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG; http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/) suggest a start date for this epoch of c. 1950 (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015; Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz & Waters 2016), the adoption of which would challenge archaeology as a discipline concerned with deep-time socio-ecological dynamics.