Humans have impacted ecosystems worldwide for the past 200,000 years, yet many studies of ecosystems do not include humans, preferring to place humans apart from the natural environment. This approach denies the fact that every ecosystem worldwide is impacted by people; to have a more sustainable future we need to use computational social science approaches to understand the human place in ecosystems. Here I highlight my work as an “archaeo-ecologist” of embedding past human societies within ecosystems.