People moving through the We Are Water MN exhibit.
Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Issue Fifteen: We Are Water MN

Water can be described as a molecule, a solvent, a relative, a healer, and a force that both gives and takes life. Reader, what is water to you? If any article in this issue brings you into deeper understanding of the answer to this question, then we have succeeded. Like the We Are Water MN project as a whole, the goal of this issue is to share multiple ways of knowing water and to deepen your relationship with and responsibility to water.

The opening ceremony for the We Are Water MN exhibit at the University of Minnesota.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue Fifteen

A couple of summers ago, the University hosted an international graduate student workshop on the environmental humanities, that is, interdisciplinary examination of environmental questions from scholars of literature, philosophy, language disciplines, and the like. Not surprisingly, the group wanted to take a Mississippi River boat tour and I was invited along as the University’s resident “river guy.”

Archaeological site of Aukispukio in a now uninhabited area of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range.
Feature

Multiple Ways of Understanding Peru’s Changing Climate

In this article, we consider how the perspectives and experiences of contemporary people facing climate change can enrich our archaeological interpretations of climate change in the past. In particular, we present an ethnographic study from highland Peru that highlights the complex and varied ways people are responding to environmental uncertainty, and explore how their perspectives and responses have led us to question and expand the narratives we construct about ancient people.

View of the Chixoy River, the Tortugas salt dome, and the Nueve Cerros ridge in 2018. This part of Guatemala was covered in lush forest for over a millennium between the Classic collapse and the land initiatives of the 1980s.
Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Issue Fourteen: Climate, Change & People

Archaeologists, by definition, are interested in using various techniques to learn about the human experience in diverse places, from ancient through contemporary times. A key part of this has been understanding human adaptation to diverse environmental and climatic changes over time, and for archaeologists, the long arc of human existence refers to at least around three million years.