The Anthropocene is here, but do we need the Anthropocene, and if so, when do we want it to start? My responses are ‘no’ and ‘never’ if the answers to those questions require a discrete definition of the Anthropocene and a specific start date. In that regard, I agree generally with Braje's arguments. Particularly unsettling in Anthropocene discourse (in archaeology or geology) has been the search for discernable origins in the form of golden spikes, and I am suspicious of even setting the Holocene as an Anthropocene equivalent. That stated, archaeology can and should continue to contribute to interdisciplinary Anthropocene dialogues.
As Braje observes, archaeologists have forwarded many fascinating and innovative examples of landscape intervention that collectively demonstrate human agency in environmental processes that might have contributed to an Anthropocene. These studies, however, often highlight social configurations that are most similar to the modern era (e.g. farmers, expansionist communities or other societies who obviously modify landscapes). Taken individually, any case can reduce the Anthropocene (recent or modern) to singular historical trajectories or general processes. The emphasis on origins is a Western historiographic technique, and can be critiqued on its own merits (Gamble Reference Gamble2007). In the context of the Anthropocene, origins research establishes a rigid and damaging path-dependency in our narratives. Origin points sever ancient and modern worlds, and they fix a moment in time after which the relationship between humans and the broader world became intertwined. There are potential unintended consequences of emphasising the more familiar or more recent, not the least of which is a devaluation of a long-term perspective. We risk the exclusion of multiple and culturally diverse authorships in the project of global landscape intervention, as well as the silencing of alternative histories or other ways of being. These other modes of inhabiting the world are crucial resources in demonstrating both how lacking in inevitability the modern Anthropocene was, and providing perspectives on alternative strategies of living in the world.
The Anthropocene is not without merit conceptually. Certainly, as Braje notes, archaeology can and must contribute to a recognition of the long-term coupling of humans and the world, modernity's relationships with the past and the mitigation of deleterious social and economic practices. Yet there is also great potential for archaeologists to engage more broadly using archaeological techniques and theories in order to interrogate the contemporary world. If there is one aspect of the Anthropocene that has been truly useful (and problematic for stratigraphers), it is its ambiguous, hybrid and heterogeneous nature. The concept has helped unify numerous disciplines in challenging traditional Western dichotomies (e.g. nature/culture, subject/object, human/animal) and perceived temporal and spatial boundaries of human action. For example, the emergence of new theories that re-situate objects and other non-human agents in anthropological thought (Thomas Reference Thomas2015) provide a working space for understanding the complex materiality of modern substances such as concrete, radionuclides or plastiglomerates that defy easy separation into natural or social phenomena. The Anthropocene also necessitates a complex and nuanced understanding of time and agency. Although specific golden spikes may have short-term histories, the surface of the Earth is the product of numerous processes set in motion at different points in time by communities of diverse worldviews. Similarly, the historical experiences of persons contribute to how they perceive and respond to change. Today, the Anthropocene is often couched in terms of catastrophe, and can evoke millenarian or eschatological imagined futures that have consequences for policy and practice. So, too, we can interrogate the past to examine how communities attempted to create new futures for themselves as they reconciled perceptions of changing worlds with traditional practices and associations to places (Sassaman Reference Sassaman2012). In the long run, the Anthropocene's usefulness lies in its ability to captivate imaginations and to direct interdisciplinary research on inhabitation. Precisely defining it, and situating it in a time-space framework, takes away that opportunity.
