Nola Palestrant, Tamalpais High School
Elic Weitzel is a human ecologist and archeologist at the University of Connecticut. He presented at Terra Linda’s Innovation Hub on October 25, 2023, to discuss his research with pre- and post-colonial White-Tailed Deer herds, and what their fluctuating populations can tell us about how the humans living in New England interacted with the environment. Following the arrival of Europeans, White-Tailed Deer populations decreased from 30 million to 300,000. This decline was largely a result of a decreased Native American population - which had previously performed control burns that optimized the environment for deer - and an increase in commodification. Mr. Weitzel’s research can be used as a foundation for us to reconsider our interactions with the natural world, with the ultimate goal of promoting sustainability.
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| Elic Weitzel |
1. How did you become interested in Archeology?
I've wanted to be an archaeologist since at least the age of 13. History and nature were always my two main interests, and I think a lot of that came from watching documentaries on TV as a kid. I loved the exotic locations that Steve Irwin and the Kratt Brothers would explore to find interesting animals, and I also loved History Channel programs about what life was like in ancient Egypt and Greece. So I think that combination of interests led me to archaeology at a young age. I'm not sure how I first learned what archaeology was (perhaps it was Indiana Jones?), but I quickly realized it was a career path where I could learn about history first-hand and also experience the thrill of exploring the natural world. I think the fact that I chose to specialize in the study of animal bones from archaeological sites also reflects these early influences.
2. What are some things that people can notice about the world around them that provide clues into the past?
Most material clues into the past are invisible, as they're often buried in the ground, but we definitely take for granted all the ways in which the past can still be visible to us today, in one form or another. The names of the roads that we drive on are my favorite example of this. These often offer clues into what the landscape used to be like, recorded in names such as Indian Village Road, Old Mine Road, etc. Most people don't think twice about these sorts of things, but these place names are often a clue that there used to be a Native village or historical gold mine in the area. Some other clues require a closer look to interpret. For example, archaeologists have found that the plant species that grow around ancient archaeological sites are often different from the species which grow elsewhere. This is because people long ago modified the landscape around where they lived, either deliberately or inadvertently, and that legacy continues to shape today's ecosystems. Finally, you can sometimes find archaeological artifacts like arrowheads or pottery if you know what you're looking for. They often turn up in many different places since people have lived on the land for so many thousands of years. It's never good to take an artifact if you do find one, as removing artifacts from their context prevents archaeologists from learning anything about the past through them. But they do exist out there and many people accidentally encounter them.
3. What materials have been commodified by past societies that could increase our sustainability if we lessen their values?
Most past societies never commodified anything. The process of taking something and exchanging it in a market economy to make money is a very recent development in human history. One can make an argument that certain societies in the past like the Romans may have engaged in a form of this activity, but the way that commodities are produced and exchanged in our world today only dates back around 500 years to the birth of capitalism in northwestern Europe. As such, most societies throughout time would likely have found such a behavior to be quite strange, and would be especially shocked at how such an economy functions. I certainly think the evidence suggests that commodification of natural resources and people's labor has led to a wide variety of problems in the world today, so I too find such a behavior to be quite strange. But regardless of what is being commodified and when, the key to promoting sustainability is to focus on meeting people's needs, not on making money. That's the trick to reducing the value of a commodity back to a more reasonable level: strip away the extra value it has to those despotic individuals in society engaged in exploitation and profiteering and get back to the basics of helping all people survive and thrive. For example, water has very high value to everyone since it's necessary for survival. But certain individuals and corporations often try to control water, prevent others from accessing it, and then charge high prices for access: essentially selling the water back to the people who live on top of it. Nestle has recently done this in California, sucking up all the groundwater reserves in certain areas to make money from bottled water sales. Archaeologists have found that in the past, many societies had very elaborate systems of managing water at the local community level. A lot of this research even comes from the southwestern United States. These systems of water management ensured that everyone could access water and that it remained sustainably available into the future. So the way to prevent despotic individuals and groups from artificially inflating the value of commodified resources is to prevent them from gaining control in the first place. I think the archaeological evidence suggests that the best way to do that is through strong, local democratic control of resources by relevant stakeholders.
4. What practices from pre-colonial Native Americans can we replicate today to create a more sustainable society?
In general, I wouldn't argue that we need to adopt practices from any past societies to promote sustainability in the present. I think the social, economic, and political contexts in which people used to live are not analogous to those we find ourselves in today, so many specific practices likely wouldn't transfer well. Sometimes something specific could be adopted, such as controlled burning of the landscape to promote ecosystem health. But I think more generally, we can be inspired to develop new sustainable practices by studying old ones. There is abundant evidence, for example, that sustainability in the past often occurred when groups of people managed natural resources and economic systems themselves on a local level. Outcomes were often unsustainable when outside groups of despotic individuals sought to control the resources, labor, and bodies of others for their own benefit. So based on that, I think the biggest thing that we can do today to promote sustainability is to implement stronger democratic control of the economy on a local level. Keeping things local means that people have a vested interest in sustainability since it directly impacts them, and keeping things democratic ensures that those stakeholders can govern their own lives and their own communities and prevent any selfish individuals from exploiting the group for personal gain. I don't think that we need to directly adopt a way of doing this from a thousand years ago, but the general principle remains the same: local democracy by stakeholders leads to far better outcomes for people and nature. As such, if we really want a sustainable society today, I think we need to take that lesson and implement it however we can in our own historical context. So, inspired by my research and that of others, I think worker co-ops, land trusts, and other forms of community governance are our best options to promote a sustainable future. These aren't things that past societies did specifically, but the general principles behind such practices were implemented to great success in the past and would likely be successful in the present as well.
5. What other peoples or practices from the past would you like to research that could provide insight to aid our efforts to live more sustainably?
The big question for me is how sustainability follows from economic governance and control. I want to keep investigating all the different ways that local democracy by the relevant stakeholders contributes to a sustainable economy. I think unsustainability often results from self-interested individuals in society attempting to become despots and control the economy for their own benefit. This then leads to overuse of resources and exploitation of other people. So I'd really like to keep exploring how these processes worked in the past in the hopes that I can learn more about sustainability and implement helpful policies in the present. For example, some societies in the past were remarkably egalitarian for their size and complexity, like the ancient Bronze Age state that existed in present-day India and Pakistan called the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. It would be fascinating to study such a context to see whether a less hierarchical and potentially more democratic society was indeed more sustainable. I also think that many smaller-scale societies are useful to study, especially tribal societies like the Amazigh of northern Africa or pre-20th century Albanian tribes, as these groups often had sophisticated ways of governing resource use and economics on a local level. While restructuring 21st century America into a tribal society would not be useful or viable, that doesn't mean that tribal groups don't have lessons to teach us in how a community can sustainably exist in their environment for millennia.
Future archaeologists will be able to learn a lot about our society in 2023 through a variety of means. We leave a huge amount of material remains behind that archaeologists could use to better understand our diets, our jobs, our recreation, our family life, and our public life. Many objects that are made of plastic or metal will not degrade so easily, and can therefore preserve information about our lives for future study. The size of our refrigerators speaks to how large our families are and how much food we consume, the size of our houses speaks to our wealth and position in society, and the layout of our cities speaks to the broader social, economic, and political forces that shape where we choose to live. Interestingly, as more and more of daily life becomes digital instead of material, this presents new challenges for future archaeologists. Digital archaeology must therefore become a major field of study in the future, where one might not excavate through the dirt to uncover someone's home, but might instead excavate through bits of electronic data to uncover similar information.
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