Episode 237

Greetings From the Anthropocene!

Get ready for a two-part exploration of the proposed "Anthropocene" era. Can we define a chunk of geological time based on human impacts? When would that start--at the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s (CE)? Earlier? Later? More importantly...should we even try? Plus, we learn about industrial archaeology and get briefly derailed by a man named Frerb Hankbert. Make sure to stay tuned for the second installment!

To learn more about what we cover in both parts, check out:

Geologists Vote to Reject Anthropocene as an Official Epoch (Center for Field Sciences)

Anthropocene (Oxford English Dictionary)


GSA Geologic Time Scale v. 4.0


The “Anthropocene” (International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter)


Anthropocene Curriculum


How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene? (SAPIENS)


Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use (Science)


Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene (Nature)


Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents (Nature)


The Industrial Revolution kick-started global warming much earlier than we realised (The Conversation)


The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Archaeology (via WorldCat)


Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass (Nature)


An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record (GSA Today)


The Technofossil Record: Where Archaeology and Paleontology Meet (Anthropocene Curriculum)


Defining the Anthropocene (Nature)


Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4), 761–780. 


Whyte, Kyle. "Indigenous Climate Change Studies : Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene." English Language Notes, vol. 55 no. 1, 2017, p. 153-162. Project MUSE.


Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch (Scientific American)


The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Science)


Capitalocene (Progress in Political Economy)


Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin (Environmental Humanities)




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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.