Archaeology has a long history of research in reconstructing past environments and in attempting to understand the interactions between climate and human societies. So far, however, there has been little attempt by archaeologists to employ this knowledge in the debate over current global climate change. This paper provides a broad overview of the relevance of archaeology to the problem of global climate change, yet also attempts to consider some of the challenges that require further debate. We propose five areas where archaeology may be able to make significant contributions to global climate change discourse: (1) the study not just of past social 'collapse' but of how ancient societies attempted to manage decline and recovery in the face of long-term environmental change; (2) the ability to rethink the nature/culture divide; (3) the use of public archaeology to further education and awareness on environmental links and impacts; (4) the study of social injustice and how it may affect societal responses to the environment; and (5) the building of common 'intercultural' responses to climate change. Challenges identified are (1) making clearer in public debate the relevance of archaeology to present and future climate change; (2) the contexts in which people really learn from the past; (3) how different (national) traditions of archaeological research may affect our ability to relate archaeology to global climate change; and (4) how human-induced climate change on a global scale alters traditional historical approaches to human agency.starts from the premise that archaeology does have an important contribution to play in current debates over global climate change. In particular, archaeology is uniquely well placed to investigate interactions between climate and human cultural evolution over the very long term. So far, however, archaeology has not played a conspicuous role in contemporary climate change discourse and this paper attempts to consider some of the reasons why archaeology has struggled to demonstrate its relevance in this respect. This paper is not an attempt to summarize the voluminous literature on prehistoric environmental changes and how they affected human societies. Nor do we discuss how global warming may impact archaeological fieldwork or heritage conservation. 2,3 Instead, we focus on broader epistemological issues relating to how archaeology may contribute to climate Volume 3,The previous section has summarized some of the debates and controversies within archaeology over the role of climate and the environment in human history. As we have shown, many archaeologists have Volume 3,
