Michael Newland is an archaeologist working on climate change and disaster response. His lecture on May 26, “Climate Change: A Look Backward, A Look Forward” will focus on past climate change impacts on California Native Americans and the threats that climate change poses to our nation’s cultural heritage. He will share examples from multiple locations around California and talk about what the implications of the existing data are for future impacts. Using conclusions drawn from his work with modern Tolowa communities, he will tease out some of the social road blocks western civilization has towards addressing climate change and enacting solutions available at hand, framing the challenges facing all of us at a personal and cultural level.

A question/answer period will follow.

The talk is free of charge. Coffee, tea & cookies provided.

Questions about the event: email or text/call

Mike received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Davis and Master’s degree at Sonoma State University. He is the Director for the Northern California Cultural Resources Group for Environmental Science Associates. Prior to this, he served as a Senior Staff Archaeologist for the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University for nearly 20 years.

Mike is a past president of the Society for California Archaeology and continues to serve the Society as Co-Chairman of the Climate Change and California Archaeology Committee, which he founded in 2012. He also serves nationally on the Society for American Archaeology’s Climate Change Committee. His climate change work has appeared in The Atlantic, American Archaeology, and The Archaeological Record. Mike is part of a team of archaeologists and human remains recovery dogs that recovers human cremations stored in homes destroyed by forest fire; his team’s work has been featured in National Geographic Online, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. In 2019 he received the North Bay Business Journal Community Philanthropy Award for this work. He was the lead author of a chapter on tribal issues and climate change in Public Archaeology and Climate Change (2017), which he co-authored with several tribal scholars, and recently published a chapter on climate change and archaeology in Climate Abandoned, edited by Jill Cody in 2019. He is a regular public speaker and is a frequent contributor on the topic of archaeology and its intersection with everyday life for the KQED Perspectives series; his audio essays are archived online at https://www.kqed.org/author/mikenewland