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hol.sagepub.com In considering the concept of the Anthropocene, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008) argues that we can no longer separate studies of Natural History from Human History, and these two disciplin-ary distinctions are now inextricably intertwined. This perspec-tive defines the approach we have taken in this Special Issue of The Holocene. The assembled papers deal with many facets of human–environmental relationships leading to the rise of the Anthropocene by examining a geographically and culturally diverse set of sites and case studies from a deep-time perspective. With these concluding remarks, we highlight some key issues resulting from this collection of papers, emphasizing the impor-tant contribution of a deep-time interdisciplinary perspective to our understanding of how we arrived in this current environmen-tal situation as well as how we might find a path forward into