Sustainable Pasts and Futures in the Archaeological Imagination

Contributions to this forum exemplify the diversity and creativity of archaeological approaches to contemporary environmental crises. Many archaeologists expose the historical contexts of contemporary environmental challenges (e.g., Douglass and Cooper 2020; Lightfoot et al. 2021; see also Hunter 2025; Ko 2025; Stewart forthcoming; this forum) and work with community stakeholders to address environmental injustices via engaged practice (e.g., Apodaca and Sigona 2023; Douglass et al. 2019; Rothenberg 2023; Schwalbe 2023; Wolverton et al. 2021; see also Barnett forthcoming; Cabral 2025; Gilheany 2025; this forum). Others focus on times and places less closely connected to modern communities, working within the comparative anthropological tradition to draw analogies between past and present that may inspire innovative technologies and policies (e.g., Fagan and Duranni 2021; Fisher 2020; Guttmann-Bond 2019; see also Bauer 2025; Kearns 2025; Gaggioli 2025; Marston 2025; this forum). My own research in Iceland fits best within this comparative tradition, so I have found myself drawing analogical parallels between past and present environmental contexts, in hopes of inspiring meaningful action (Catlin 2016; Catlin 2023; Catlin and Bolender 2018). There has been considerable ambivalence about a “lessons-from-the-past” approach to modern ecopolitics (e.g., Catlin 2016; Fisher et al. 2009; Lane 2015; Redman 2005; see also Kearns 2025; Marston 2025; Morell-Hart 2025; Morrison 2025; this forum). Nonetheless, archaeologists engaged in this work remain convinced that past human experience holds important lessons for an uncertain future, and a number of recent publications have presented pathways toward productive conversations between past and present ecopolitics (e.g., Bauer 2023; Fisher 2020; Grauer 2021; Grauer 2023; Hartman et al. 2017; Rockman and Hritz 2020; Rosenzweig and Marston 2018). Archaeologists are well practiced at applying the material culture of the past to construct historically contingent trajectories of environmental and social change. Environmental archaeology reveals the character, scale, and timing of past ecological transformations (e.g., Ko 2025; this forum), and simultaneous or sequential changes in material culture and the built environment suggest connections between social organization and human ecodynamics. This groundwork illuminates historically specific social and political processes that were a cause or consequence of environmental transformation. It is then possible to evaluate whether a past context presents a positive example to emulate or an object lesson to avoid. Applying our conclusions to the present requires scaling and translation to provide a clear and actionable strategy for effective crisis mitigation in analogous modern contexts. Finally, insights must be effectively communicated to appropriate audiences if they are to inspire action. Ideally, an archaeological approach to environmental politics should articulate specific “lessons from the past” that (1) are scalable and transferable between contexts without sacrificing nuance, (2) point to a clear action item, and (3) underscore the essential contribution of archaeology, either by providing unique insights or adding significant support to insights from other disciplines. Scalar transformation of past human ecodynamics is often challenging. Specific ecological practices, such as sustainable subsistence strategies, may not easily transfer to modern contexts, while generalizations such as the potential for resilient urban planning may not be clearly actionable. Rather than focusing on specific technologies or practices, it may be more effective to identify the political and social strategies that enabled certain material practices as a driver of or response to past ecological conditions (here I echo arguments made by Bauer 2025; Gaggioli 2025; Marston 2025; this forum). This amounts to seeking explanations for past transformations that are rooted in social relations rather than in material practice. Archaeology's unique long-term perspective affords not only a description of past events, but also their antecedents and causes as well as long-term impacts and consequences (Beck et al. 2007; Fisher 2020). This explicit attention to the complex particularities of historical processes allows archaeologists to identify modern contexts that may be socially and politically analogous to past examples of human ecodynamics, suggesting effective interventions even when specific ecological practices may have substantially differed. What social mechanisms led to the transformation of practices and lifestyles, and how were they sustained over time? What social and political relationships led to changes in human ecodynamics in the short or long term? Did ecological sustainability have negative social consequences (such as increased inequality)? Answering these questions may help to better evaluate modern social relationships and policy proposals, leading to the development of environmental policies that both encourage sustainable practice and align with social justice goals. In this way, an ecopolitical lens on past crises may open new ways to translate between spatiotemporal scales, as advocated by Hunter (2025; this forum). Iceland's environmental history provides an illustrative example. The island's settlement by Norse farmers in the late 9th century CE precipitated significant environmental degradation, leading to substantial changes in subsistence and land management practices during the first centuries of settlement (McGovern et al. 2007). As settlers cleared woodlands to create permanent, productive fields and pastures during the 9th and 10th centuries, a high rate of soil erosion was an unintended consequence in many areas (Catlin 2019; Catlin and Bolender 2018; Dugmore et al. 2009). Following the immediate impact of the settlement, erosion began to slow and eventually reached a less damaging, relatively stable state (Catlin 2019). Meanwhile, by the mid-10th century, the entire productive landscape was divided into farming properties (Steinberg et al. 2016). Very small-scale farms, which my research has shown were an important part of the settlement landscape through the 10th century, were shut down and folded into the extensive properties of larger farms (Catlin 2021; Catlin et al. 2024). These transformations in land management set the stage for the historically documented system of tenant farms, which are attested in saga literature as early as the 10th century. By the 17th and 18th centuries, tenancies were occupied by a class of deeply impoverished, highly mobile tenant farmers (Bolender 2012; Gunnlaugsson 1988; Johnson and Bolender 2019). The environment that emerged via entangled social, political, and ecological processes during the 9th to 11th centuries could support minimal subsistence agriculture at the millennial scale, despite its highly degraded appearance to modern sensibilities (Catlin and Bolender 2018; Dugmore et al. 2020). This situation lasted until the 18th and 19th centuries, when a loosening of Danish colonial restrictions opened opportunities for both land ownership and international trade to former tenant farmers (Júlíusson 2020). The number of sheep grazing in the highland doubled as farmers took advantage of new opportunities, and erosion rates correspondingly rose (Catlin 2019; Thórhallsdóttir et al. 2013). The closure of small farms by the 11th century accompanied significant changes in household distribution and management, land use, and ecological practice. The contraction of settlement from dispersed farmsteads in a range of sizes to fewer, larger farms opened space for more extensive land use. In my research area, many of the by-then-abandoned small, early farms were replaced by agricultural enclosures and buildings for livestock during and after the 12th century (Catlin 2019; Figure 1). These enclosures consistently encircle deeper soils than the surrounding landscape, providing a reliable source of quality grazing and outfield hay. The new outfield enclosures functioned as part of an existing system of earlier infrastructural developments, including homefields and pastures, boundary walls in the broader landscape, and the domestic and agricultural buildings that made up farmstead centers (Einarsson 2015). As the system of tenant farming emerged, standardized agricultural infrastructures and practices facilitated the precarity and mobility of tenants, enabling farming households to move between farms on a sometimes yearly basis with limited losses to overall regional productivity (Johnson and Bolender 2019). Many of the outfield infrastructures show evidence of reuse and maintenance up to the 18th century, when their upkeep appears to have waned, corresponding to a period of increased economic opportunity as well as higher erosion rates (Catlin 2019). Reliable long-term agricultural infrastructures thus appear to have combined with constraints on socioeconomic mobility to promote sustainable landscape use between approximately the 10th and 18th centuries in Iceland. Sustainable infrastructures would have drawn farmers and their livestock to perform similar practices year after year, reinforcing a social system that limited opportunities to explore alternative economic choices. This feedback loop between sustainable ecology and sustained poverty seems to have remained viable for centuries, until Iceland's entry into the global capitalist marketplace made unsustainable landscape practices possible, profitable, and widespread (Thórhallsdóttir et al. 2013). I suggest several possible “lessons from the past” based on this case study. These observations are translatable and scalable, and they provide clear archaeological support to urgent ecopolitical critiques within broader conversations. First, extreme social inequality has been effective at producing sustainable resource use. Developing sustainable initiatives that promote social justice is therefore likely to pose many significant challenges. This observation echoes critiques of environmentalisms that have promoted sustainability for some at the expense of others, and adds support to calls for explicit attention to social justice in environmental policy (e.g., Agyeman et al. 2016; Sovacool 2021; Sze 2018). Alternative examples of past sustainability and resilience where social differentiation was less extreme may provide positive case studies for comparison (e.g., Grauer 2021; Petrie et al. 2017). Second, farmers stopped using sustainable outfield enclosures when alternate modes of land use became profitable. Thus, while infrastructure can support sustainable practice, the mere existence of such infrastructure is not sufficient: People will only use infrastructures as long as prevailing social and economic relationships encourage them to do so. Designing infrastructures that are both just and sustainable will require long-term collaborative partnerships with the communities who intend to use them, including attention to the ongoing colonial and racial violence that is often entangled with environmental policy (e.g., Boyer 2017; Lennon 2020). Third, the ecological contexts of 10th-century closures of small farms and of the 19th-century capitalist revolution in Iceland indicate that changes in environmental, social, and economic relations tend to occur together. Moments of societal upheaval (“crisis”) may therefore provide opportunities to reimagine environmental policy (see also Beck et al. (2007)). Here, I join Marston (2025; this forum) in advocating for explicitly political approaches to resilience theory, especially the “reorganization” phase (Redman 2005). Finally, archaeological storytelling may prove to be a powerful intervention for environmental politics (Rockman and Maase 2017; Rooney-Varga et al. 2018). My recent experiences as an instructor at an Ivy League institution as well as a small state university in the rural US South have demonstrated that learning about past environmental politics can be transformative for students who may never have considered parallels between their own concerns and those of others separated by centuries or millennia (see Stewart forthcoming; this forum). Moreover, an environmental justice lens has led me toward more nuanced interpretations of Icelandic small dwellings (Catlin 2023). As several contributors to this forum emphasize, the stories that we choose to tell matter, making measurable impacts on our discipline, our students, and our publics (see Barnett, Hunter, Kearns, Marston, Morrison, this forum). Pushing the field of archaeology to center past ecopolitics in our research agendas will generate new stories and ideas that may expand the limits of possible, imaginable futures and pasts, within and beyond our discipline and for the next generations of ecopolitical thinkers and leaders. My thanks to the people of Skagafjörður, Iceland for their hospitality and support, to the organizers and participants in this forum for catalyzing numerous productive conversations, and to Douglas Bolender and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on drafts. I gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research from the U.S. National Science Foundation (PLR #2038102, #1523025), the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation, and the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the Icelandic Fulbright Commission. Any opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.