American Anthropologist COMMENTARY Vital Topics Forum: Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis Whose “Problem” Is the Climate? Deep Time Perspectives and the Contemporary Lens Shanti Morell-Hart Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA Correspondence: Shanti Morell-Hart (shanti_morell-hart@brown.edu) Received: 21 June 2024 Revised: 8 November 2024 Accepted: 1 February 2025 Narratives of environmental disaster have galvanized survivalists, religious fringe groups, environmentalists, policymakers, and science fiction writers. What triggers large-scale transformation, and how do people endure upheaval? How are human lifeways etched into the landscape—lifeways that simultaneously nego- tiate and reflect such ruptures? Scholarly approaches devoted to the human and the long term have focused on ancient complex societies and large-scale transformations in human- environmental relationships. Meanwhile, contemporary narra- tives surrounding “collapse,” “resilience,” and “sustainability” are framed in relation to historical trajectories and complex entanglements. These framings have been developed through archaeological research, historical documents, anthropological case studies, environmental sciences, and sometimes simply popular discourse. Here I briefly consider the “problem” of climate in deep time. Archaeological scholarship has greatly contributed to discussions of major societal upheavals in the longue durée, especially where they intersect with environmental transformations (Crumley et al. 2015). Such transformations include those defined as “nat- ural,” “anthropogenic,” and combinations thereof. Mining the deep human record, we find many cautionary tales. By reviewing periods of radical environmental transformation, we can glean some sense of potential future disaster, both social and ecological. Social effects have included warfare, mass migration to other areas, societal absorption, and cultural hybridity. In cases where mobility is hampered, borders undergo increased enforcement, and refugee camps spring into existence. In less dystopian exam- ples, we find local flexibility and resilience through innovation and renegotiation, strategies that reduce mobility and morbidity alike. The promise of “better futures” leads us to seek such analogues in the deep past to negotiate present predicaments (Crumley et al. 2015), from responses to extreme weather to shifts in agricultural strategies. But we must also consider how we frame our inquiries. Following Catherine Kearns (2019, Early View), climate is not an “antagonist” in absolute terms, nor can it be easily characterized with words like “favorable” or “deleterious.” Narratively framing climate change as bellicose or even villainous, she argues, does an injustice to the complexity of human-environmental relationships. Even the Anthropos of the Anthropocene reduces the core of climate change to a homogeneous group equally sharing responsibility for—and shouldering the burden in “solving”—radical climate change. Instead, we find extraordinary complexity in the relationships between climate and society. We find dynamic relationality between various subjects and actors, as they intermesh in contemporary and ancient settings at various scales (Kearns 2017). Such framing probes the very stuff of agency and our understand- ings of complex ethnoecological relationships. Here, I use the term ethnoecology (first coined by Harold Conklin 1954) as short- hand for the dynamic relationship between affordances provided in a landscape and impacts of human activities on that landscape. Taking an expanded and more symmetrical approach, we could consider many kinds of environmental actants (humans, animals, soils, bacteria, etc.), complex assemblages of these actants that emerge over time and space, and a broad range of interactions (constraints, augmentations, disruptions, etc.) that develop and dissolve relationships between actants. In this framework, the This article is part of the Vital Topics Forum “Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis.” © 2025 American Anthropological Association. American Anthropologist, 2025; 00:1–3 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28103 1