Mention the study of “sustainability” or “resilience” to an archaeologist these days, and one is apt to provoke one of three responses. Not uncommonly, the topics are met with some derision and suggestions that anyone advocating such areas of study are simply pandering to contemporary interests, often at the expense of efforts to understand the past on its own terms. Equally common are retorts that the socio-ecological systems models employed by those who apply Resilience Theory (RT) to ethnographic or archaeological case studies are simply revamped versions of environmentally determinist models from the 1970s, meaning they must be viewed as an affront to the agent-centered analyses currently in vogue. Indeed, it is only within a small circle of scholars who have truly struggled to understand RT and its many conceptual tools that one is apt to illicit a response that, on one hand, extols the virtues of RT—as a means to accommodate diverse environmental and sociocultural data sets and model change in complex adaptive systems over both time and space—and on the other hand, admonishes anyone who conflates the application of a heuristic device with the generation of an explanatory narrative (i.e., our models are not answers per se but rather tools [idealized scenarios] that help us elicit replies to specific research queries). Michelle Hegmon and her colleagues in the American Southwest have long understood that although the realities of the archaeological record often diverge considerably from the ideal expectations of key RT conceptual devices—such as the Adaptive Cycle (Hegmon et al., American Anthropologist 110:313–324; Nelson et al., American Antiquity 71:403–432; Nelson et al., Ecology and Society 16[1]:25)—this does not mean that these tools have no analytical value for us. Indeed, it is because the tools have allowed us to recognize these divergences, and forced us to explain them, that the utility of such conceptual devices has been substantiated.

In The Give and Take of Sustainability, Hegmon carries on with this important line of inquiry by advancing what she refers to as an “Archaeology of Human Experience,” with a focus on the “give and take of sustainability.” The volume draws attention to both the short- and long-term implications of the daily decision-making carried out by individual agents and broader communities. The focus is on the necessary trade-offs at the heart of such decisions, the “giving up of one thing in return for another” (p. 3). When trade-offs are considered in RT terms, and through the lens of the Robustness-Vulnerability scale, it can be demonstrated that building “robustness in one realm incurs vulnerabilities in others” (p. 4). For example, “it is not always possible to alleviate poverty and preserve the environment simultaneously” (p. 2). Indeed, many of the case studies in the volume—deriving as they do from diverse parts of the world and including both ethnographic and archaeological examples—effectively underscore that programs of environmental stewardship are often advanced at the cost of social inequalities. Other case studies focus on the short- and long-term implications of trade-offs as these relate to food, water, and military security

The key lesson to emerge from the various case studies is that win-win scenarios, although they are often the goal of agent-based decision-making, are rarely achieved. This is because the unintended consequences of trade-offs reverberate over both time and space, and across different social groups and even individuals. Acknowledgment that such agent-based decision-making plays a crucial role in socio-ecological resilience undermines the view that RT is just another form of environmental determinism. Similarly, the complex decision-making scenarios outlined in the detailed case study presentations, and the careful considerations of the broader ramifications of the documented trade-offs they speak to, belies any assertion that the past is not being allowed to speak. In summary, The Give and Take of Sustainability effectively demonstrates how sophisticated RT-based archaeological and ethnographic interpretations have become and successfully highlights how agency can be accommodated within an RT approach. Clearly, the trade-offs that permeate daily decision-making are crucial to our understanding of the human experience. It is often the unintended consequences of what may have initially been perceived as effective decision-making (win-win) that contributes to precisely the type of societal heterogeneity (inequality) and spatio-temporal flux (resilience and vulnerability) that earlier models of socio-ecological systems were rarely able to capture.