Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent compilations of radiocarbon data in different countries throughout the world enable unprecedented opportunities for comparative analyses of prehistoric human demography and cultural evolution in relation to climate change. Yet, the methods and, importantly, the theory for conducting comparisons of radiocarbon records and paleoenvironmental datasets are only just beginning to come into focus. For example, one pattern among radiocarbon records worldwide is the sustained growth of human populations during the first three millennia of the Late Holocene, followed by rapid declines from 1000-600 cal BP. Are these trends reflecting global scale climate and environmental forcing mechanisms? Do they represent common human-environment interactions, regardless of the scale of cultural complexity? Or, are they merely the consequence of sampling and research biases? This symposium aims to better understand such questions by bringing together specialists from around the world and focusing on different types of approaches. Organized by the PAGES PEOPLE3000 (Paleoclimate and the Peopling of the Earth) project, the symposium will contribute to explaining the dynamic processes, often non-linear, reflected in radiocarbon time-series, which are challenging paleoscientists to rethink traditional models of human-environment interaction and the roles of agriculture and cultural complexity in mediating climate-human population dynamics.