People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Regional research programs continue to explore the value of radiocarbon and dendrochronological databases for paleodemographic modeling. In western North America trends in population, subsistence, and settlement are being studied within several dynamic ecosystems. This poster session proposes to examine, and begin comparing, models of Holocene climate change and its impact (or lack thereof) on regional adaptations in Western North America. Some models now include multiple paleoclimatic and demographic proxies, but often neglect to explicate their theoretical models for either climate or demographic subsistence models. This session will explore the development and application of radiocarbon and stable isotope methods, including related cautions in statistical analysis and data interpretation, with regard to climate and demographic/subsistence models. Questions of causality in cultural change are examined in the context of the chronological resolutions of proxy datasets.
Other Keywords
demography •
Dating Techniques: Radiometric •
Archaic •
Paleoindian and Paleoamerican •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling •
Chronology •
Climate •
Zooarchaeology •
Human Behavioral Ecology •
Mogollon
Geographic Keywords
Arizona (State / Territory) •
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
USA (Country) •
Utah (State / Territory) •
Nevada (State / Territory) •
California (State / Territory) •
North America: California and Great Basin •
North America: Pacific Northwest Coast and Plateau •
New Mexico (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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Addressing Taphonomic Complications in the Use of Archaeological Radiocarbon Assemblages as Population Proxies: A Case Study in the Bonneville Basin (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the imperatives driving reconstructions of past demography is the desire to analyze the impacts of past climate changes on human populations. An increasingly popular tool is the analysis of archaeological radiocarbon record, but the very paleoclimate changes that are of interest also have geomorphic effects—and the...
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Assessing Settlement Dynamics in the San Juan Islands and Northwestern Washington, a Bayesian Approach (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent developments in Bayesian approaches to radiocarbon dating have enabled reexaminations of questions of population dynamism in the Salish Sea. This study expands on Taylor et al. 2011 using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and an expanded data set of 538 radiocarbon dates from academic and cultural resource management...
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Charcoal, Pollen, and Statistics: Spatio-Temporal Occupation of the Black Rock Desert Basin (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Black Rock Desert Basin (HUC-6 160402) comprises the largest basin in northwest Nevada. Covering approximately three billion hectares, this basin contains the Quinn River drainage and the Black Rock and Smoke Creek playas. A radiocarbon database for the basin was assembled from the peer-reviewed and cultural resource...
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Evaluating the Impacts of Past Climate Change on Demographic and Subsistence Patterns in the Basin-Plateau Region of Western North America (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and paleoclimatological research increasingly reveal long-term impacts of past climate on human subsistence, settlement, and demography, yet positive results are debated and the underlying dynamics structuring these correlations remain questioned. Coupling a comprehensive dataset of radiocarbon-dated...
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Impact of Paleoclimate Variation on the Settlement History of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau through the Use of Summed Radiocarbon Probability Distributions (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Settlement histories of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau have been compiled through the record of riverine villages of the Columbia and Fraser Rivers and their many tributaries. Columbia-Fraser Plateau chronologies have seldom been revisited in the years since their publications in syntheses of the 1980s–1990s. Our analysis of...
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Impacts of Abrupt Climate Change Events on Human Paleodemography in the Great Basin (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A central question of research on prehistoric human-environment interaction concerns the role of abrupt versus gradual climate and environmental changes on human demography. This research requires high resolution, regional-scale paleoenvironmental records that provide researchers with the ability to discern variable spatial...
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Maize, Construction, and Population Changes: One Way to Identify Sunk Cost Behaviors in Central Mesa Verde (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When the environment changes, sedentary people choose whether to stay and invest more in their current adaptive strategy, or abandon their land and residence to go somewhere with greater opportunities. For a well-understood portion of the upland US Southwest we ask: when the maize niche shrinks, do people continue investing...
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Paleoindian Settlement of the Central Great Basin: Testing Environmental, Radiocarbon, and Lithic Proxies with Data from Grass Valley, Nevada (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explaining Paleoindian settlement decisions in the Central Great Basin remains an important though controversial topic. Unfortunately, the limited archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from the region make progress on this issue challenging. To help address some of the problems of limited data in order to better...
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Radiocarbon Datasets, Population Proxies, and Climate Proxies: The Hanford Reach and the Yakima Fold Belt, Columbia Plateau (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A review of progress in radiocarbon dating for riverine and upland sites identifies data gaps and issues that are relevant for understanding archaeological landscapes. A total of 183 radiocarbon dates have been obtained from the Hanford Reach and adjacent lands; 108 of these date cultural materials. Occupations appear to...
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What Late Formative Period and Modern Jackrabbits (*Lepus californicus) Tell Us about Climate Change in the Southeastern Southwest (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster documents the environmental conditions of the Tularosa Basin/Hueco Bolson during the Doña Ana and El Paso phases (AD 1000–1450) in the Jornada Mogollon Region of the US Southwest by comparing stable carbon isotope values of black-tailed jackrabbits (*Lepus californicus) from archaeological sites to modern...