Living Through Change: The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions. Introduction to the Special Issue

The role of humans as agents of environmental change is central to debates far beyond the discipline of archaeology. Life’s essentials such as sustenance, fuel, shelter and material crafts have a fundamental relationship to the exploitation of natural resources. Given this pervasiveness of resource use, human action has had a profound influence on shaping the world around us, and with current global politics and a growing recognition of the threats of environmental change, it is not surprising that the voices of environmental archaeology have grown much louder in recent years. At the forefront of the study of past humanenvironment relationships, environmental archaeologists are keenly placed to explore what it means to live through longand short-term environmental change, contributing powerful and evidence-based accounts of human-environment interactions from the deep and recent past and their on-going ramifications (Dearing et al. 2006; d’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2016). Such explorations encompass not only changes to local and regional environments precipitated by human activity (e.g. Fairhead and Leach 1996; Redman 1999; Butzer 2005), but also the responses in human behaviour that are themselves stimulated by dynamic and changing environments (e.g. Rockman and Steele 2003; Cooper and Sheets 2012; Kintigh and Ingram 2018). The importance of these themes is reflected in the increasing reach of the discipline outside of the traditional boundaries of archaeology (e.g. Sandweiss and Kelley 2012; Guttmann-Bond 2019; though see Richer et al. 2019 for commentary). Within this broader framework, this special issue brings together a selection of papers presented at the 40th conference of the Association of Environmental Archaeology held in 2019 at the University of Sheffield. This conference provided an opportunity to reflect on the discipline’s past, and debate its future in the context of growing bodies of data, the integration of multiple proxies for change, new analytical techniques and fresh theoretical paradigms. The call for the conference was broad, reflecting the breadth of sub-disciplines that fall under the umbrella of environmental archaeology, yet urged for papers that explored environmental change from the human perspective, through engagement with questions of change, adaptation, sustainability and human impact. The Association for Environmental Archaeology (AEA) has been at the forefront of environmental archaeology for the past 40 years. Beginning in the UK as a means of communication between specialists in an emerging field, the Association has developed into an international body adapting to the evolving and expanding approaches environmental archaeology now encompasses. The AEA champions the study of the relationship between humans and the environment, and the implications of that relationship for the development of human society and our impact on the world around us. The health and appeal of environmental archaeology is reflected by the strong attendance at the 40th AEA Autumn conference, with 153 registered delegates, of whom 70 were AEA members (Figure 1). Unlike many archaeology conferences, only 63% of these were from academia, with 28% from the commercial sector and government agencies highlighting the importance of the discipline outside the academic world. Delegates were mostly based in the UK, but the global reach of environmental archaeology was apparent with delegates having travelled from Japan, Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The University of Sheffield was a fitting host for this 40th anniversary of the AEA. Glynis Jones – who joined the Department of Archaeology at Sheffield in