Lessons for an invisible future from an invisible past: Risk and resilience in deep time

Abstract

The interrelated concepts of risk and resilience are inherently future-focused. Two main dimensions of risk are the probability that a harmful event will happen in the future and the probability that such an event will cause a varying degree of loss. Resilience likewise refers to the organization of a biological, societal, or technological system such that it can withstand deleterious consequences of future risks. Although both risk and resilience pertain to the future, they are assessed by looking to the past – the past occurrence of harmful events, the losses incurred in these events, and the success or failure of systems to mitigate loss when these events occur. Most common risk and resilience measures rely on records extending a few decades into the past at most. However, much longer-term dynamics of risk and resilience are of equal if not greater importance for the sustainability of coupled socioecological systems which dominate our planet. Historical sciences, including archeology, are critical to assessing risk and resilience in deep time to plan for a sustainable future. The challenge is that both past and future are invisible; we can directly observe neither. We present examples from recent archeological research that provide insights into prehistoric risk and resilience to illustrate how archeology can meet this challenge through large-scale meta-analyses, data science, and modeling.