Resilience (Other Keyword)
1-25 (31 Records)
Simplistic scenarios of the role of climate on the dynamics of socio-political trajectories are increasingly being replaced by coupled models in which climate and societies undergo mutually influential interactions. The concepts of adaptive cycles and resilience have been particularly helpful in understanding these interrelations. Based on an extensive body of data from Early to Upper (Young) Neolithic sites in western Central Germany and adjacent regions, a model is proposed which takes into...
Ancient Caribbean-Mainland Plant and Animal Translocations: Cultural, Biogeographic and Biodiversity Legacy (2015)
The Caribbean’s pre-peopling flora and fauna were the culminations of both vicariant and long-distance dispersal processes, coupled with evolution in relative isolation spanning more than 20 Mya. Human colonization beginning around 7,000 years ago coincided with extinctions of megalonychid sloths and giant flightless owls-- the archipelago’s only large terrestrial vertebrates-- probably precipitating the first human-induced trophic cascades and initiating the first of a series of...
Applying Adaptive Cycles to the Life History of Ancient Maya Agricultural Systems (2015)
Archaeologists often struggled with understanding the life-cycles of relic agricultural field systems. By incorporating the multi-variable approach of the adaptive cycle, complex relationship dynamics can be identified and applied to understanding the historical sequences of specific cases studies. Demonstrating this is the intensive terrace systems and settlement within the Contreras Valley and the associated ancient Maya center of Minanha, Belize. The variables identified include the...
Ceramic Production during the Terminal Classic at Holtun, Guatemala (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of provenance studies to answer anthropological questions related to the production and access of ceramics is well documented for the Maya region. Mineralogical and chemical compositional analyses are often used to identify the material origins, or provenance, of ceramics. In this paper, the authors report on Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) and...
Charting Long-Term Social Stability in the Tres Zapotes Region: Theory, Method, and Settlement Patterns (2017)
In 2014 we initiated the Recorrido Regional Arqueológico de Tres Zapotes (RRATZ) to implement the NSF-funded project, "Long-term Social Stability in the Tres Zapotes Region." The goal of this project was to better understand the resilience of a tropical lowland polity through a millennium of political, economic, and environmental challenges, to document the preconditions that gave rise to this Olmec and Epi-Olmec polity, and to document the transformations that occurred in the wake of its...
Climate, resources and strategies: simulating prehistoric populations in semi-arid environments (2015)
The aim of this study is to model resource management and decision making among hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral groups in semi-arid zones in order to explore evolutionary trajectories in relation to (a) the appearance of other specialized groups during the mid-Holocene and (b) environmental variability. The study of coexistence and interaction between groups with different subsistence strategies and land-use behaviours represents an interesting research challenge to understand socio-ecological...
Comparison of a Community-Scale Classic Maya Political Adaptive Cycle with a Bimonthly-Resolved Paleoclimate Record from Uxbenká, Belize (2017)
In studies of human-environment interactions, the conceptual framework of panarchy and its associated resilience theory posit that periods of stability and transformation are inevitable in what has been termed an "adaptive cycle". This presentation discusses the reconstruction of a community-level political adaptive cycle for Uxbenká, an ancient agrarian polity in the Maya hinterlands, and explores its linkages with the broader political ideology of divine kingship and climate stress. Employing...
Decorated Ceramics from Excavated Mimbres Sites (2007)
This synthesis presents counts of decorated ceramics from excavated sites in the Mimbres region.
Environment, history and resilience of archaic coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers from the Atacama Desert, northern Chile (2015)
The coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the most extreme environments of the Andean area. However, the high productivity of the Pacific Ocean facilitated the peopling of this territory as early as 12.000 years cal BP and also a continual occupation of hunting-gathering-fishing communities throughout the Holocene. In this paper we discuss significant environmental changes during the Middle Holocene, as well as the systematic interaction of local communities with inland...
The Environmental Conquest of West Mexico: The Lake Pátzcuaro and Malpaso Valley Case Studies (2017)
Though the next century will bring great environmental challenges the impact of global warming pales in comparison to the dramatic environmental changes associated with European Colonialism, beginning in the late 15th century. Chief among them is the Conquest of the Americas involving the breakdown of millennial-aged systems of land engineering and tenure, compounded by depopulation, and the introduction of the Euro-agro suite. Throughout Central Mexico the initial century of Conquest...
A Frontier in Bloom: Social Implications of Architectural Diversity and Conformity during the Colonization of the San Juan Region of the Northern Southwest (2017)
Behavioral conformity and, its inverse, behavioral diversity are social adaptations wielded by small scale agricultural societies faced with change. By the sixth and seventh centuries A.D., the Basketmaker III period, long standing conflicts in the San Juan region of the northern Southwest had abated and new territories opened to agricultural colonization. Frontier colonization is by nature a contentious process that usually results in violence, displacement, and the reinforcement of factions....
General Resources from the Long Term Vulnerability and Transformation Project
Long-Term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico: Each generation transforms an inherited social and environmental world and leaves it as a legacy to succeeding generations. Long-term interactions among social and ecological processes give rise to complex dynamics on multiple temporal and spatial scales – cycles of change followed by relative stasis, followed by change. Within the cycles are understandable patterns and irreducible uncertainties; neither...
Geological subsidence and sinking Islands: the case of Manono (Samoa) (2015)
W. Dickinson, as part of his wide study of the geological history of Pacific islands, has proposed in a series of papers to explain the unique case of the deeply submerged Lapita site of Mulifanua in Western Upolu (Samoa), as linked to the slow subsidence of Upolu Island. Recent archaeological research on the neighboring small island of Manono, has brought new and detailed data on this geological process. A series of dates allow to define chronologically the speed of the subsidence as well as...
Hierarchy and Human Securities in Norse Vatnahverfi, South Greenland - A Case Study (2015)
Greenland was settled by Norse hunter-farmers in the decades around AD 1000. Two fjord systems were populated: South Greenland formed the largest settlement area that lasted until c. AD 1450, the smaller Norse settlement area in present day Nuuk fjord being abandoned c. 100 years earlier. New detailed archaeological settlement evidence from the Vatnahverfi-a core settlement area in the Norse Eastern Settlement-is explored in terms of environmental- and food securities relating to community level...
IHOPE Maya: Linking lessons of the past to our present and future (2015)
Since 2007 the IHOPE Maya team has focused on synthesizing dynamic human-environmental interactions of the ancient Maya of southeastern Mexico and upper Central America (400BC-900AD). A series of great tropical societies, the Maya occupied a diverse range of tropical environments, adapting local strategies to meet varied subsistence, economic, political, and ecosystem service needs at large and small urban centers. Cycles of expanding populations, increasing despotism, and reliance on...
Modeling ecological resilience and human-environment interactions in engineered landscapes of the prehistoric American southwest (2015)
The prehistoric human footprint in the American southwest is extensive and includes large and small structures, agricultural features, and other signatures of long and variably intensive landscape use. The southwest Jemez Mountains, focus of the current study, have been occupied continuously for the past 2,000 years, and by circa 1300 CE were densely settled in a network of large village sites and fieldhouses. Evidence from tree-rings and fire scars suggests that prior to ca. 1900 Jemez...
Monumentality and Cultural Resilience in Coastal Louisiana (2016)
Resilience is the ability of complex systems to adapt to change in the wake of disturbance. Here, we describe the relationship of natural deltaic land evolution and anthropogenic monument construction using a case study of Ellesly Mound, an earthen monument located in the Lafourche subdelta of the Mississippi Delta. Borehole and LIDAR data show that Ellesly mound is situated above naturally deposited crevasse sediments underlain by organic-rich facies indicating a relatively low-lying vegetated...
Of Pirates and Pilots: The Impact of Climate on Illicit and Survival Behaviour on the Fringes of Global Society (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontier and Settlement Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Relationships between people and landscapes can be used to inform upon social and behavioural variations. Hurricanes and shifting climactic dynamics around Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks NC directly affected this relationship. Historically, Ocracoke provided vital trade and communication links from the West Indies to North America. Pilot Town,...
On the Margins of the Marginal? Fringe Settlement and Land Use in Norse Greenland (2017)
Just before AD 1000 pioneer Norse hunter-farmers settled in Greenland and established what would be the extreme western outpost of Scandinavia and Europe for the next 450 years. The unexplained disappearance of this marginal medieval colony around AD 1450 has always puzzled researchers and has been proposed as a prime example of maladaptation to climatic and environmental deterioration at the onset of the ˈLittle Ice Ageˈ (LIA). As part of the Island Ecodynamics in the North Atlantic Project...
Raw Data on Soils Collected from Prehispanic and Historic Fields on the Middle Gila River (2013)
These are the raw data from the soils collected from the middle Gila River (on the land now management by the Gila River Indian Community) for Strawhacker's dissertation research.
Resilience and identity: the ethnoarchaeology of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg (SW Libya) (2015)
In the Tadrart Acacus (SW Libya), ethnoarchaeological research carried out between 2003-2011 has shown that its current inhabitants, the Kel Tadrart Tuareg, are a successful example of adaptation to extreme climatic and environmental conditions. Their exceptional resilience, characterized by high degree of variability and opportunism, escapes some of the traditional assumptions often done in ethnography and archaeology regarding the classification and identification of societies, such as...
Resilience, Hierarchy, and the Native American Cultural Landscapes of the Yazoo Basin and the Mississippi Delta (2016)
Within the field of ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to withstand change and to regenerate itself after disturbance. Adapted to the archaeological study of past cultural systems, the concept of resilience refers to the capacity of a cultural system or a cultural landscape to endure change. Archaeologists have primarily recognized resiliency in cultural systems of regions characterized by arid conditions, either permanently or periodically. This paper considers prehistoric...
The Role of Infrastructure in Wari State-Making in Southern Peru (2017)
In southern Peru, the transition from the Early Intermediate to the Middle Horizon during the seventh century A.D. was marked by the expansion of Wari state colonists and influence from the Ayacucho heartland. Andeanists have long postulated the role of climate change and drought during this initial state expansion, while issues of chronology complicate this issue. Here, we reevaluate the radiocarbon data from the early Wari colonies of Cerros Baúl and Mejía in the upper Moquegua Valley in...
Seeking Justice in Black Spaces: The Geography, Memory, and Power of Race Massacres in the United States (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many urban centers bear the scars of anti-Black violence and race massacres. Predominately Black spaces have been especially susceptible to various forms of racial unrest at the hands of their white counterparts. Massacres such as those in the Snowtown neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in 1831 and the...
The Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) Project (2016)
Although comparative studies have been criticized in recent years, especially within the more post-modern corners of anthropology, cross-cultural studies continue to have value for exploring the sometimes congruent, and at other times unique, manner that different communities choose to confront analogous socio-ecological issues. The Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) project is a long-term endeavor aimed at promoting the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary examination of...