The development of sustainable economies and resilient ecosystems is increasingly important to communities searching for food security in the twenty-first century. Because of our access to long-term records of human interaction with environments at different scales, archaeologists and other historical scientists are uniquely placed to contribute to this effort. It is often difficult, however, to extract useful information and interpretations from a fragmentary record of the past. This volume comprises a series of case studies from archaeology, history, and ethnography, with the goal of developing methods for analyzing and interpreting the archaeological or historical record in ways that are useful for understanding the modern environment.

In their introduction, “How Archaeology and the Historical Sciences Can Save the World,” the editors identify two goals for the volume—to place modern ecosystems in the context of long-term human interactions and to inform modern restoration and conservation through explicit use of historical ecological data. In the first case study, Christopher Morehart examines diversity in maize varieties and, by proxy, the ecological strategies used for agriculture by peasants in the Postclassic northern Basin of Mexico. He tracks these strategies through changing social, economic, and political systems, and determines that the value of standardization versus diversification in agriculture varied for cultural reasons rather than, or in addition to, ecological imperatives. Next, Thomas Whitley develops a highly detailed caloric model for resources in coastal Georgia, including how their distribution and availability vary throughout the year. He estimates return rates for those resources and their relative dietary contribution based on food remains from archaeological sites and considers the implications for resource use at different localities.

The next three chapters focus on agricultural societies in arid environments. Carrie Hritz and Jennifer Pournelle discuss how agricultural landscape modifications in southern Mesopotamia worked in concert with natural deltaic migration to produce a remarkably sustainable urban agricultural system. In southwestern Colorado, Kyle Bocinsky and Timothy Kohler use the framework of resilience theory to examine Pueblo migration out of the region. They argue that the intensified use of the turkey, coupled with a need for residential stability for agriculture, created an unsustainable level of rigidity in the prehistoric system. Katherine Spielmann and colleagues demonstrate that farmers in Perry and Black Mesas, Arizona, altered soil texture to be more arable through constructing terraces, and that those differences still exist today, providing a strong example of how behaviors in the past produced a landscape with an unrecognized degree of anthropogenic origin.

Emily Brock shifts the focus to the Pacific Northwest and uses a historical case study of industrial tree farming in the 1930s to examine the effects of different restoration efforts by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. She emphasizes the importance of viewing these activities as one type of restorative land use worthy of study, even if it is not the ideal restoration ecologists would prefer. Sebastian Braun also uses a historical case study, this time of the Great Plains, to assert that the modern economic and political goal of constant growth is constructed so that the people who make money from and decisions about ecosystems are not directly connected to local ecosystems and therefore have no interest in sustainability. In contrast, Sarah Quick describes the highly local efforts of Anson Mills to recapture the preindustrial farming practices and agricultural biodiversity of lowland South Carolina.

Shifting away from North America, Amanda Tickner examines highly anthropogenic settings in France—medieval pleasure gardens transformed into community gardens and mill ponds transformed into recreational spaces. She suggests that the maintenance of genuine cultural connections to landscapes is a valuable tool in encouraging conservation of those landscapes. Foster wraps up the volume by showing that Native American land use is correlated with higher biodiversity in the southeastern United States and that long-term human interactions must be considered in understanding forest structure in this region.

This volume sets a challenging goal for itself in using historical sciences to “save the world.” To highlight the difficulty of this process, most chapters are more successful at describing ecosystems in their anthropological context than at drawing the direct connections between past and future that we hope to find in the archaeological and historical records. Case studies from Mesopotamia (Hritz and Pournelle) and Arizona (Spielmann et al.) provide noteworthy examples of sustainability in the past with high potential to inform modern decisions, and Foster's case study demonstrates a direct link between prehistoric land use and modern ecological baselines. There is much to be learned from the efforts described in this book, including the importance of developing research designs that specifically address applicability to modern issues.