Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
A revolution in archaeological research now reveals that human populations often grew exponentially for long periods of time over the last 20,000 years, disrupted by periods of recession. This deep history of long-term population expansion and recession requires an explanation. In this symposium, we bring together scholars investigating feedbacks between human population, social and technological innovations, and ecosystems. The goals of the symposium are to explore what mechanisms drove exponential-like growth among many archaeological regions over thousands of years and to explain why some regions display more violent cycles of expansion and recession (sometimes called boom-busts) than other regions. To explore these questions, our posters bring together a collection of case studies, comparative studies, and formal models. The formal models will provide a foundation to critically evaluate the mechanistic relationships between innovation, constraints on innovation, and population dynamics across multiple types of ecosystems. The case studies and comparative studies will develop methods for integrating times-series of multiple types of data to document and test for causal relationships between population, social and technological innovation, and ecosystem change.
Other Keywords
demography •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling •
Environment •
Chronology •
Climate •
Climate Change •
Human Diet •
Pastoralism •
Radiocarbon •
Human Behavioral Ecology
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
USA (Country) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Oklahoma (State / Territory) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Texas (State / Territory) •
Sonora (State / Territory) •
Chihuahua (State / Territory) •
Idaho (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
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Approximate Bayesian Computation Evaluation of the Interactive Effects of Climate Change and Subsistence Economic Intensification on Precontact Population Dynamics in Western North America (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past population change is connected to significant shifts in human behavior and experience, including landscape manipulation, subsistence change, sedentism, technological change, material inequality, and more. However, population change appears to result from a complex interplay of human-environment...
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Boom-and-Bust Population Dynamics: Climate Change, Resource Inequality, and Intergroup Conflict in the Prehistoric North American Southwest (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the transition to agricultural economies human populations underwent profound changes including, in many regions, rapid growth accompanied by marked volatility. The Colorado Plateau in western North America offers unique insights into volatile population dynamics, as it represents one of the few...
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Climate Teleconnections Synchronize Human Population Dynamics (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate variability can significantly constrain the population dynamics of ancient agrarian societies, although its direct influence is often mediated by a complex interplay of social, ecological, and technological factors. Untangling these relationships in the archaeological record is challenging due to...
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Does Political Organization Impact the Severity of Population Recession? (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A critical question raised by 20 years of intensive archaeological research is: What processes drive the long-term expansion and rapid recession of human populations? In this poster, we test the hypothesis that variation in the violence of long-term population expansion and recession is caused by...
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Human Demographics, Paleoclimate, and Paleoecology of Far West Texas from the Late Pleistocene through Holocene (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast region of far west Texas remains understudied in terms of its cultural, climatic, and environmental past. Current paleoclimatological and environmental proxy data sets are few and inconsistent in time, resolution, and scope. Here, we summarize key proxy data while contextualizing human...
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Hydroclimatic Constraints on Population Growth in Dryland Foraging-Farming Communities (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Developing a unified theory of human population growth requires a multiscalar perspective on the evolution of human social-ecological systems over space and time. This requires iteration between macro-level theory and micro-scale events captured in the archaeological record. This poster begins to develop...
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Population Dynamics and Subsistence Variability on the Farming/Hunter-Gatherer Boundary: Central Western Argentina as a Case Study (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This case study integrates times-series of multiple types of proxy to evaluate causal relationships between population dynamic, subsistence/diet variation, and ecosystem change. The presentation evaluates whether intensification based on wild and domesticated resources takes different evolutionary...
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Refining Ecological Contexts of Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research that derived expectations from hunter-gatherer macroecology demonstrates that the combination of effective temperature zones and setting near coastlines or very large interior lakes display distinct patterns of resource intensification. These patterns allow researchers to predict the...
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A Simple Model of Long-term Population Expansion and Recession (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 12,000 years human populations have expanded and transformed critical earth systems. Yet, a key unresolved question in the environmental and social sciences remains: Why did human populations grow and, sometimes, decline in the first place? Our research builds on 20 years of intense...