Expertise

Explore the expertise of Lifting Rocks through our climate and heritage Issue Areas and Portfolio.

Issue Areas

  • Climate Impacts to Heritage

    Impacts to heritage range from damage due to sea level rise, storms, floods, drought, and wildfires, to loss of human connections, such as from migration, displacement, pandemics, economic transition, and conflict.

  • Adaptation Planning

    Heritage can be protected by including it in community-wide adaptation planning. In turn, history and heritage of place can be a useful source of inspiration and community engagement in adaptation planning.

  • Historic Preservation Policy

    Linking heritage and climate policy requires creative ways of carrying forward that which we value most in changing environments.

  • Climate and Equity

    All communities hold history and heritage. These include environmental justice communities and those undergoing economic transitions.

  • Climate and Migration

    Through migration, people lose their connections to and knowledge of places, and those places lose the people that know and have cared for them.

  • Conflict and Peace-building

    Heritage can be a spark for conflict and tension as environments change. It also can hold pathways for resolution, inspiration, and collaboration.

  • Environmental Knowledge and Learning

    Humans must learn the environments they live in: knowledge of weather cycles, hazards, and how to live with them are not innate. Heritage is one of the ways humans store and update environmental knowledge over time.

  • Capacity to Learn from the Past

    Heritage holds centuries and millennia of human experience. We learn from it by asking questions and exploring what heritage means to us now.

  • Place-based Storytelling

    By connecting climate with heritage, place, and narrative, it is possible to talk about climate change anywhere.

Portfolio

Explore the foundation on which Lifting Rocks builds its work:

Books and Reports

Books and Reports

Books

Rockman, Marcy and Joe Flatman (editors) (2012) Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World. Springer Press, New York.

Rockman, Marcy and James Steele (editors) (2003) Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation. Routledge Press, London.

Reports

Tandon, Aparna, Marcy Rockman, Jui Ambani, Kelly Hazejager, Mohona Chakraburtty, Joao Pedro Otoni, Anthony Rizk, and Yurim Jeong (2022) Climate.Culture.Peace Conference Report. International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), Rome, Italy.

ICOMOS Climate Change and Heritage Working Group (2019) The Future of Our Pasts: Engaging Cultural Heritage in Climate Action. ICOMOS, Paris.

Welling, Leigh, Marcy Rockman, James Watson, Brendan Mackey, and Andrew Potts (2015) The Role of World Heritage Sites in a Changing Climate. World Heritage 77:4-13.

Policy and Guidance*

Policy and Guidance

Rockman, Marcy, Marissa Morgan, Sonya Ziaja, George Hambrecht, and Alison Meadow (2016) NPS Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. U.S. National Park Service, Washington, DC.

Morgan, Marissa, Marcy Rockman, Caitlin Smith, and Alison Meadow (2016) Climate Change Impacts to Cultural Resources. U.S. National Park Service, Washington, DC (currently available as inset in the NPS Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy).

Schupp, Courtney, Marcy Rockman, Jeneva Wright, and Karen Mudar (2016) Chapter 5 Cultural Resources. In Coastal Adaptation Strategies Handbook, edited by R. L. Beavers, A. L. Babson, and C.A. Schupp, pp. 51-69. NPS 999/134090. U.S. National Park Service, Washington, DC.

Rockman, Marcy (2015) An NPS Framework for Addressing Climate Change with Cultural Resources. George Wright Forum 32(1): 37-50.

Rockman, Marcy (2014)  Lead author, Climate Change and Stewardship of Cultural Resources. Director’s Policy Memorandum 14-02. U.S. National Park Service, Washington, DC.

Popular Media

Popular Media

Rockman, Marcy (2022) Conserving cultural heritage is vital for climate adaptation (op-ed), The Hill, October 15.

Rockman, Marcy (2022)  The Courtyard (an introduction to a climate fable). Medium.com, May 20.

Rockman, Marcy with Eleanor Mahoney (Living Landscape Observer) (2020) Interview with Dr. Marcy Rockman. Living Landscape Observer, July 2.

Rockman, Marcy (2017) How to Pack a Cultural Suitcase. Medium.com, November 2.

Scientific Publications

Scientific Publications

Climate Change and Cultural Heritage

Nicholas P. Simpson, Joanne Clarke, Scott Allan Orr, Georgina Cundill, Ben Orlove, Sandra Fatorić, Salma Sabour, Nadia Khalaf, Marcy Rockman, Patricia Pinho, Shobha S. Maharaj, Poonam V. Mascarenhas, Nick Shepherd, Pindai M. Sithole, Grace Wambui Ngaruiya, Debra C. Roberts, Christopher H. Trisos. (2022) Decolonising climate change-heritage research. Nature Climate Change. DOI:10.1038/s41558-022-01279-8.

Siders, A. R. and Marcy Rockman (2022) Connecting Cultural Heritage and Urban Climate Change Adaptation. In Toward Sustainability + Equity, edited by Erica Avrami, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, New York City.

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.

Hambrecht, George, Cecilia Anderung, Seth Brewington, Andrew  J Dugmore, Ragnar Edvardsson, Francis Feeley, Kevin Gibbons, Ramona Harrison, Megan Hicks, Guðbjörg Ásta Ólafsdóttir, Marcy Rockman, Konrad Smiarowski, Richard Streeter, Vicki Szabo, and Thomas McGovern (2018) Archaeological Sites as Distributed Long-term Observing Networks of the Past (DONOP). Quaternary International.

Thomas, Kimberley, R. Dean Hardy, Heather Lazrus, Michael Mendez, Ben Orlove, Isabel Rivera-Collazo, J. Timmons Roberts, Marcy Rockman, Benjamin P. Warner, Robert Winthrop (2018) Explaining Differential Vulnerability to Climate Change Across the Social Sciences: A Review. WIREs.

Hollesen, Jørgen, Martin Callanan, Tom Dawson, Rasmus Fenger-Nielsen, T. Max Friesen, Anne M. Jensen, Adam Markham, Vibeke Vandrup Martens, Vladimir V. Pitulko, and Marcy Rockman (2018) Climate Change and the Deterioration of the Arctic’s Archaeological and Environmental Archives. Antiquity 92(363): 573-586.

Hambrecht, George and Marcy Rockman (2017) International Approaches to Climate Change and Cultural Heritage. American Antiquity 82(4):627-641.

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 (2012) The Necessary Roles of Archaeology in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. In Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World, edited by Marcy Rockman and Joe Flatman, pp. 193-215. Springer Press, New York

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.

Landscape Learning

Rockman, Marcy (2013)  Apprentice to the Environment: An Overview of the Archaeological Model of Landscape Learning in Relation to Hunter-Gatherer Ethnography. In Archaeology and Apprenticeship: Body Knowledge, Identity, and Communities of Practice, edited by Willeke Wendrich, pp. 99-118. University of Arizona Press.

Pettitt, Paul, Marcy Rockman, and Simon Chenery (2012)  The British Final Magdalenian: Society, Settlement, and Raw Material Movements Revealed through LA-ICP-MS Trace Element Analysis of Diagnostic Artefacts. Quaternary International (272-273): 275-287.

Rockman, Marcy (2009)  Landscape Learning in Relation to Evolutionary Theory. In Macroevolution in Human Prehistory, edited by Anna Prentiss, Ian Kuijt, and James C. Chatters, pp. 51-71. Springer Press, New York.

Rockman, Marcy (2008) The Importance of Places: Combining Sites and Isolates into a Long-Term Land-Use Approach to the Archaeology of the Western Papaguería. In Fragile Patterns: The Archaeology of the Western Papaguería, edited by Jeffrey H. Altschul and Adrianne G. Rankin, pp. 379-400. SRI Press, Tucson.

Steele, James, and Marcy Rockman (2003)  Where Do We Go from Here? Modeling the Decision-Making Process During Exploratory Dispersal. In Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation, edited by Marcy Rockman and James Steele, pp. 130-143.  Routledge Press, London.

Rockman, Marcy (2003)  Knowledge and Learning in the Archaeology of Colonization. In Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation, edited by Marcy Rockman and James Steele, pp. 3-24. Routledge Press, London.

Speaking and Films

Speaking and Films

Rockman, Marcy (2022) Every Place has a Climate Story Workshop. Climate.Culture.Peace Conference, January 23:

Rockman, Marcy (script, voiceover) (2021) Every Place has a Climate Story, released at COP26, November 12.

Rockman, Marcy (2021) Landscapes of Knowledge and Power in Climate Science and Policy. Seminar in University of Glasgow “Archaeology for a Changing Planet” series in honor of COP26, October 20.

Rockman, Marcy (2020) Learning How to Live Here: Linking Migration with Cultural heritage, Climate Science, and Policy. Invited lecture for the Migration in Harmony Research Coordination Network, online, October 7.

Rockman, Marcy (2020) Cultural Heritage and Climate Change (an overview of “Expanding use of archaeology in climate change response by changing its social environment”). EESI (Energy and Environment Study Institute) Briefing Series on Climate Data, Washington, DC, April 15.

Rockman, Marcy (2019) Social Ecosystems, Policy Interface, and other Unexpected Contributions of Cultural Heritage for the Challenges of Climate Change. School of Design, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, February 26.