SKOPE: Bringing Continent-scale, Local Paleoenvironmental Data to Researchers and the Public

This is a copy of the PowerPoint presentation from the SAA Annual Meeting symposium. Interest in the impacts of environmental change on human societies is increasing—and, given the latest IPCC projections, without a moment to spare. Archaeologists are engaging this interest by interpreting past human experiences with environmental change, often by reconstructing environments at local spatial and temporal resolutions most relevant to humans. Crucial tasks ahead include generalizing the plethora of reconstruction methods thus far created, comparing their skill and utility, and rendering them useful for researchers, policymakers, and the interested public. We discuss an ongoing initiative—SKOPE: Synthesized Knowledge of Past Environments—that seeks to (1) present state-of-the-art paleoenvironmental reconstructions in an intuitive, map-based web tool, and (2) generalize legacy paleoenvironmental reconstruction methods and extend them to novel landscapes. A prototype of the tool is now live at EnviRecon.org, and includes 2000-year reconstructions of agriculturally-important climate variables across the entire US Southwest at roughly kilometer-scale resolution. Current efforts seek to scale the reconstructions to cover North America. Results from SKOPE research in the Southwest are already demonstrating the promise of such large, high-resolution reconstructions for understanding past human behavior, and perhaps informing the future.