"Global change" has become one of the most urgently debated topics of our time. But is global change primarily a new phenomenon, a consequence of the industrial revolution and of modern capitalist and totalitarian states? Or have humans been active agents of environmental and landscape change over longer periods of time? These are fundamental questions which this course will address. Although human-induced changes to the global environment and natural biotic resources have accelerated with industrialization over the past 300 years, such changes have a much longer history. Particularly since the rise of agriculturally-based societies and associated population expansion during the early Holocene, humans have had cumulative and often irreversible impacts to natural landscapes and biotic resources worldwide. The extent of such changes has prompted some scientists to call for the definition of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. This course thus explores a rapidly developing area of knowledge, one that is explicitly inter-disciplinary, at the interface between archaeology, ecology, geography, environmental studies, geomorphology, and many other traditional disciplines. The fundamental objective is to use the power of such a multi-disciplinary perspective to ask how and to what extent humans and human cultural activity have played a key role in transforming the Earth.

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