Allen Dart, Executive Director, Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, Tucson
Monday, June 20, 2022,
2:30-3:30 pm,
The Koffler Great Room, ASA
Returning to ASA for another dive into Arizona archaeology, this time relating it directly to our current situation vis à vis sustainability, Allen Dart describes his topic:
The deep time perspective that archaeology and related disciplines provide about natural hazards, environmental change, and human adaptation not only is a valuable supplement to historical records, it sometimes contradicts historical data used by modern societies to make decisions affecting social sustainability and human safety. What can be learned from scientific evidence that virtually all prehistoric farming cultures in Arizona and the Southwest eventually surpassed their thresholds of sustainability, leading to collapse or reorganization of their societies? Could the disastrous damages to nuclear power plants damaged by the Japanese tsunami of 2011 have been avoided if the engineers who decided where to build those plants had not ignored evidence of prehistoric tsunamis? This presentation looks at archaeological, geological, and sustainable-agricultural evidence on environmental changes and how human cultures have adapted to those changes, and discusses the value of a “beyond history” perspective for modern society.
Allen Dart has been working and volunteering as a professional archaeologist in Arizona and New Mexico since 1975. He was president of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society from 1991-1993 and founded Tucson’s nonprofit Old Pueblo Archaeology Center in 1993. He received the Arizona Governor’s Archaeology Advisory Commission Award in Public Archaeology in 1997 and the Arizona Archaeological Society’s Professional Archaeologist of the Year Award in 2012, among others. He holds a Masters degree from UA.
Edited by Suzanne Ferguson, Academy Village Volunteer