I’m an archaeologist from the US with a wide range of research and experience in the connections of climate change and cultural heritage. My long-running research focus is landscape learning, which explores how humans gather, remember, and share environmental information. I’ve used this work to address situations as diverse as cultural resource management in the American West and homeland security risk communication in Washington, DC. From 2011-2018 I served with the US National Park Service (NPS) as the inaugural Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources and recently have held multiple roles in international climate heritage and US national climate science and policy. These have included working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), coordinating with ICCROM a conference on climate, heritage, and conflict and peace-building, and coordinating climate change hearings and briefings with the U.S. Congress.
Here at Linnaeus University, I’m a Visiting Researcher in the program of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures. I’m also Associate Research Professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Research
My research is organized around the central question of how working with the past can help address modern environmental problems. Currently it has three major threads. First is landscape learning. This is a model that looks at how humans have come to know unfamiliar environments across space and time and how such knowledge has been stored, shared, and - at times - lost. I study both archaeological and historical traces of learning and loss and, as climate change is now turning the world around us into an unfamiliar place, how archaeology and heritage can support environmental learning into the future. Second is intersections of climate change and cultural heritage. This includes both impacts of climate change on heritage and how to work with heritage as part of climate adaptation and response. As part of this, I’m currently working with the histories of both heritage policy and climate policy and how both forms of policy might be more fully integrated in future versions at national and international levels. Finally, I also work patterns and practices of narrative and storytelling. This research supports science-policy translation and is part of understanding how place and experiences in it are remembered and shared. I’m also beginning to build connections in the use of story and dialogue in developing future-oriented care for heritage, climate, and conflict-reduction.
Commissions
Sample publications include:
Rockman, Marcy (2024). Capacity of the US Federal System for Heritage to Meet Challenges of Climate Change. PNAS 121, e2317158121.
Thomas, Kimberly et al. (2019). Explaining Differential Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Social Science Review. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 10, no. 2, p. e565.
Kohler, Tim and Marcy Rockman (2020). The IPCC: A Primer for Archaeologists. American Antiquity 85(4): 627–651.
Rockman, Marcy and Carrie Hritz (2020). Expanding use of archaeology in climate change response by changing its social environment. PNAS 117 (15): 8295-8302.
Rockman, Marcy and Jakob Maase (2017) Every Place has a Climate Story: Finding and Sharing Climate Change Stories with Cultural Heritage. In Public Archaeology and Climate Change, edited by Tom Dawson, Courtney Nimura, Elías López‐Romero, and Marie‐Yvane Daire, pp. 107-114. Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK.
Rockman, Marcy et al. (2016). Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science and Climate Change Response Program, National Park Service.
Rockman, Marcy (2010). New World with a New Sky: Climatic Variability, Environmental Expectations, and the Historical Period Colonization of Eastern North America. Historical Archaeology 44(3): 4-20.
Rockman, Marcy and James Steele, editors (2003). Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation. Routledge Press.
