Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change

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.