People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America

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.