Jeremy Sabloff’s Archaeology Matters: Action Archaeology in the Modern World (2008) is an important text to consider in today’s world, and a text to help us understand how archaeology is not just understanding the past, but it expands on the possibility of helping humans understand our future. Archaeology has a role of not only studying the past, but providing information on how to deal with modern society’s problems. Crucial information can be supplied by archaeologist, who have spent the time researching past societies and we can apply their research to our current world. Sabloff provides ways we can implement archaeology in the 21st century, he acknowledges throughout his book that archaeology is linked with prehistoric and historic items
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Action archaeology is application by archaeologist, with their knowledge, to real world issues that are happening today and using what they learned by concentrating on historic societies. The relevance of archaeology in the 21st century should not be underestimated, Sabloff’s term of “action archaeology” is an important term to keep in mind, he defines it as “involvement or engagement with the problems facing the modern world through archaeology.” Sabloff includes many different examples of this in all the chapters but the work in Peru and Bolivia with the ancient agricultural method of “raised field agriculture”, is what personally stood out due to the fact. The use of this example is important, it illustrates how the successes and accomplishments of past societies can be as important to understand as the failures. In today’s world, we have a growing crisis in our dependence of technology to deal with other problems, such as over-population and environmental sustainability. In a couple of decades, a large part of the world will have problems feeding their people, we already have trouble feeding those who live in poverty, so imagine when we have a population too large for our ecosystem to naturally maintain. Will technology be advanced to the point where the problem will have a simple solution? Or will it cause a collapse …show more content…
Sabloff claims that urbanization is “one of the most significant trends of the 21st Century” (Sabloff 2008, 69), this claim is followed by the inclusion that two hundred years ago, only two and a half percent of the world lived in cities but now, it’s more than fifty percent. This has huge consequences because urbanization is increasing, not decreasing. The resources necessary to maintain a functioning city are also increasing, but this isn’t a new 21st century problem, ancient cities had the same issues. Archaeologist have researched ancient cities and urbanization, and their founding’s, should be applicated to cities today. The ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia, and its method to maintaining the largest pre-industrial city functioning well, was to not densely concentrate the population in one area but was to spread it throughout (Sabloff 2008, 74). Kotkin’s book The City: A Global History mentions the factors that cities, ranging from 5,000 years to today, must have to be have a good overall health- sacredness, opportunity, and commerce. Sabloff includes Kotkin’s work because it supports his claim on using action archaeology, and its contributing factor for supporting the importance of archaeology in today’s world. If a city has those three factors, it tends to flourish and will attract people to those
Action archaeology is application by archaeologist, with their knowledge, to real world issues that are happening today and using what they learned by concentrating on historic societies. The relevance of archaeology in the 21st century should not be underestimated, Sabloff’s term of “action archaeology” is an important term to keep in mind, he defines it as “involvement or engagement with the problems facing the modern world through archaeology.” Sabloff includes many different examples of this in all the chapters but the work in Peru and Bolivia with the ancient agricultural method of “raised field agriculture”, is what personally stood out due to the fact. The use of this example is important, it illustrates how the successes and accomplishments of past societies can be as important to understand as the failures. In today’s world, we have a growing crisis in our dependence of technology to deal with other problems, such as over-population and environmental sustainability. In a couple of decades, a large part of the world will have problems feeding their people, we already have trouble feeding those who live in poverty, so imagine when we have a population too large for our ecosystem to naturally maintain. Will technology be advanced to the point where the problem will have a simple solution? Or will it cause a collapse …show more content…
Sabloff claims that urbanization is “one of the most significant trends of the 21st Century” (Sabloff 2008, 69), this claim is followed by the inclusion that two hundred years ago, only two and a half percent of the world lived in cities but now, it’s more than fifty percent. This has huge consequences because urbanization is increasing, not decreasing. The resources necessary to maintain a functioning city are also increasing, but this isn’t a new 21st century problem, ancient cities had the same issues. Archaeologist have researched ancient cities and urbanization, and their founding’s, should be applicated to cities today. The ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia, and its method to maintaining the largest pre-industrial city functioning well, was to not densely concentrate the population in one area but was to spread it throughout (Sabloff 2008, 74). Kotkin’s book The City: A Global History mentions the factors that cities, ranging from 5,000 years to today, must have to be have a good overall health- sacredness, opportunity, and commerce. Sabloff includes Kotkin’s work because it supports his claim on using action archaeology, and its contributing factor for supporting the importance of archaeology in today’s world. If a city has those three factors, it tends to flourish and will attract people to those