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)
- Climate Change and Cultural Response in Holocene Southeastern North America (2016)
- Diving into Environmental Change: Underwater Archaeology of a Holocene Refugium in the Great Lakes (2016)
- Holocene climate change and human population growth rates (2016)
- The Middle and Late Holocene Archaeological and Climatic Records of Southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas: New Insights and New Revelations (2016)
- Preceramic Mesoamerica: Chronology, Culture, and Climate (2016)
- Preliminary Results from Pollen Analysis of Soil Cores at Crystal River (8CI1), Florida (2016)
- Riparian Oases and Environmental Variation during the Archaic Period in Southern Arizona, 4000 to 2000 BP (2016)
- Social-Ecological Resilience on California’s Northern Channel Islands: The Trans-Holocene Record from Paleocoastal Mariners to Complex Hunter-Gatherers (2016)
- Soil, Climate, and Culture Records on the Southern Great Plains (2016)