Understanding the Nature and Timing of Human Responses to Environmental Change

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.