Archaeology is concerned with understanding the peoples of the past and their histories, and as an academic subject, it is predominantly placed in the Faculties of Arts or Social Science. Yet, with its focus on material remains, on stratigraphies, on dating, and on the spatial dimensions of culture, archaeology—under the labels of environmental archaeology and geo-archaeology—interacts naturally with geology, as well as physical and human geography.

Archaeologists and the public alike have been fascinated by past calamities since at least the discovery of Pompeii. Yet, this fascination is rarely coupled with adequate notions of how such extreme events transform into natural disasters through these events’ interactions with contemporaneous social structures. For some time now, a growing number of archaeologists have advocated for the larger engagement of archaeology as a discipline with the climate change debate and with Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Through its inherently interdisciplinary work, archaeology produces evidence-based narratives of past human-environment interactions that often command substantial public interest—and numerous workers have argued that narratives are crucial tools in translating environmental science into actionable ideas.

Operating at the interface between the natural and the social sciences/humanities, DRR research confronts the articulation of climate change, extreme events, and politics. Despite this, research funding and policy-maker attention remains strongly focused on the investigation of the hazards in question rather than striking a balance between understanding hazards and at-risk-communities at similar levels of detail and sophistication. The realization that the root causes of disasters are never entirely ‘natural’ is not new, and recent reviews of this field signal important shifts toward greater attention paid to the social science and humanities approaches.

The growing body of case studies concerned with the intricate cause and effect pathways leading from extreme event to social change underlines how natural calamities may have cascading effects that reverberate through social and demographic networks. Such events can have long-term social and political legacies, and their most dire effects may often be indirect ones, mediated by culturally specific components such as religious belief or political system. These effects can occur, and indeed can be amplified, at great distances from the actual calamity.

Information from past calamities may be used to inform planning for future extreme events. Indeed, the stakes are high, given their potentially destructive and disruptive impact on a society. Such ‘possibilism’ carries with it the danger of hysteria, but archaeological and historical data can be effectively used to modulate this risk by offering historically informed, evidence-based information on both the geophysical as well as sociocultural parameters of past extreme events that, critically, retains a great deal of immediacy and intimacy to particular, previously affected communities.

The denial of catastrophic risks and the potential impact of extreme events and their disastrous social consequences may come at a high cost; complacency will only aggravate the next disaster. Modern societies are at even greater risk than past societies due to the entanglement of modern societies in and extreme dependence on expansive, highly complex social, economic, and technological networks. It is essential that existentialist questions posed by the threat of natural hazards not be avoided in neither the scientific and public discourses, although it is paramount that a balance between hysterical catastrophism and myopic naiveté is struck. There is no reason that information concerning past disasters and past vulnerability gleaned from the archaeological record should not be used more proactively as part of an educational strategy intended to raise resilience and to allow communities to prepare themselves for the future.

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