Next NYAS Lecture: Living in the Anthropocene

Join us in the Wenner-Gren Foundation offices on Monday, March 23rd at 7pm for the next installment of New York Academy of Science, Anthropology Section’s lecture series, when we welcome Dr. Sophia Perdikaris (Brooklyn College-City University of New York) presenting “Living in the Anthropocene: Long-Term Human Ecodynamics in Barbuda, West Indies,” with Dr. Pam Crabtree (New York University) serving as lecture discussant.

The island of Barbuda, on the outskirts of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, served in Colonial times as a provisioning island rather than a site of sugar cane agriculture. As a result, many archaeological sites on low-lying areas occupied by pre-Columbian populations have remained relatively undisturbed. Traditional archaeological studies in the Caribbean focus on pottery, stone tools and bones, all of which are frequently encountered on Barbuda, yet provide limited understanding of past people’s daily lives. Highly integrated archaeological projects using cross-disciplinary methodologies and techniques have been developed as an effective analysis model in mostly temperate latitudes, including Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles and Scandinavia, but they have rarely been applied in the Caribbean. For the last 4 years, cross-disciplinary teams combining archaeology and paleoecology have been working in Barbuda examining the people/environment interactions from peopling (ca. 6000 BCE) to modern day. Extensive research in Barbuda finds that Barbudans perceive environmental changes in less urgent ways than those found in western society. As sea levels rise and a new government pushes for economic development, many archaeological sites are threatened and some have already been destroyed.

This event will take place at the Wenner-Gren Foundation Building, 470 Park Avenue South, 8th Floor, New York (at 32nd Street). A dinner and wine reception (free to students) will precede the talk at 6pm, with the lecture beginning promptly at 7pm.