Understanding the Nature and Timing of Human Responses to Environmental Change
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Archaeology is well suited for understanding how prehistoric societies responded to environmental change. Examples of such change can include processes directly and indirectly related to climate, such as temperature, precipitation, and rising lake or sea level, as well as others such as volcanism. Many environmental records are very highly resolved, with some approaching annual sequencing. However, archaeological chronologies have historically lacked comparable degrees of sensitivity. Recent advances in building and working with archaeological chronologies has increased the precision of these models, and are presently helping researchers understand the capacity for rapid and often significant cultural change in response to changing environmental conditions. One important result of these developments are new, enhanced understandings of prehistoric culture history and how local and regional sequences changed in response to different environmental conditions. Another result is the occasional opportunity to chart different responses across multiple regions to the same general environmental change. This session presents multidisciplinary datasets and methodologies from North and Central America that illustrate these processes of response and adaptation.
Other Keywords
Climate Change •
Geoarchaeology •
Irrigation •
Pollen Analysis •
Underwater Archaeology •
Archaeology •
Radiocarbon dates •
Early Agriculture •
Radiocarbon •
Sea-Level Change
Geographic Keywords
North America - Southwest •
North America - Southeast •
Mesoamerica •
North America - Plains •
North America - Midwest •
North America - California
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
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Climate Change and Cultural Response in Holocene Southeastern North America (2016)
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The historical trajectories of many societies in southeastern North America have been linked to changes in climate and biota. Rainfall regimes influenced population distributions as much as political geography during the late prehistoric era, and arguably well back into the past. Likewise, sea-level fluctuations shaped settlement near changing shorelines and resulted in population movement over much larger areas. Changes in biota over large areas brought about changes in settlement at the...
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Diving into Environmental Change: Underwater Archaeology of a Holocene Refugium in the Great Lakes (2016)
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While many paleoenvironmental methods have achieved extraordinary resolution, regional reconstructions based on these methods are rarely as accurate or as refined as often assumed. Data points are typically few and far between, and are interpolated over a heterogeneous landscape; concealing significant variability. These problems are particularly acute in the Great Lakes region, where fluctuating lake levels and environmental changes during the early Holocene were diverse and punctuated. Recent...
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Holocene climate change and human population growth rates (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Statistical analysis of large databases of radiocarbon dates enables research on the processes regulating human population growth rates. Recent analysis of summed probability distributions of dates from the entire states of Colorado and Wyoming has found that both states had similar long-term growth rates of .04% for most of the Holocene. This growth rate was the same for Australia, Europe, and North America throughout much of the Holocene. Similar growth rates between different environments and...
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The Middle and Late Holocene Archaeological and Climatic Records of Southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas: New Insights and New Revelations (2016)
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A contextual analysis of 3,989 radiocarbon dates provides unprecedented insights into 8,000 years of prehistoric adaptions and social evolution in the northern Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas. The chronology is particularly robust between 4500 BP and historic times, allowing for distinctive subsistence, technological, and social developments to be isolated throughout the terminal Middle Holocene and Late Holocene and corresponding Middle Archaic, Late Archaic, and...
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Preceramic Mesoamerica: Chronology, Culture, and Climate (2016)
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Recent and ongoing investigations in Mesoamerica are showing how different regions followed different developmental trajectories leading up to the adoption of ceramic technologies and sedentary lifestyles. This threshold, which typically defines the end of the Archaic period, was reached at different points in time anywhere between about 1800 and 900 BC. These multiple preceramic adaptations seemingly imply that Mesoamerican cultural diversity that marks Formative and later periods had its basis...
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Preliminary Results from Pollen Analysis of Soil Cores at Crystal River (8CI1), Florida (2016)
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Environmental changes have been frequently cited as causal factors in the growth and collapse of complex societies in the American South. Gulf Coast archaeologists, in particular, have turned to generalized global paleoclimate curves in attempts to understand how ancient coastal villagers responded to environmental shifts. Archaeological palynology, a notably under-utilized resource in the region, offers fine-grained resolution and the ability to investigate local, as well as regional landscape...
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Riparian Oases and Environmental Variation during the Archaic Period in Southern Arizona, 4000 to 2000 BP (2016)
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Late Archaic forager-farmers in the Sonoran Desert lived in a resource-rich but water-poor environment. Rivers that flowed through major valleys supported lush riparian habitat, creating linear oases bounded by foothills covered by desertscrub vegetation and “sky island” mountain ranges. Hunting and foraging in these diverse ecosystems supported small but stable populations throughout the region, and by 4000 BP low-level maize agriculture was incorporated into the subsistence diet....
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Social-Ecological Resilience on California’s Northern Channel Islands: The Trans-Holocene Record from Paleocoastal Mariners to Complex Hunter-Gatherers (2016)
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For more than 12,000 years, the Chumash and their ancestors thrived in a maritime hunting and gathering existence on California’s Northern Channel Islands. Despite a dearth of terrestrial game, growing populations, and major changes in climate and geography, the resilience of these maritime hunter-gatherers across the Holocene is remarkable, with only limited evidence for long-term human impacts, extinctions, or abandonment until the arrival of Europeans. Trans-Holocene archaeological sequences...
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Soil, Climate, and Culture Records on the Southern Great Plains (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This paper compares radiocarbon chronologies for climatic and cultural changes in Texas and the Southern Plains region utilizing multiple sources. A radiocarbon baseline (>100) from select river basins across Texas helps reconstruct the alluvial histories of these catchments. This baseline establishes a framework for understanding aspects of climate change, as alluviation provides a proxy for general cycles of precipitation and aridity. Next, the alluvial-climatic records are supplemented by a...