Farmers’ Responses to Resource Stress and Climate Change in the Prehistoric US Southwest

Summary

Researchers in the semi-arid US Southwest have long linked abandonment, mobility, and other high-visibility culture changes to climate change, particularly shifts in precipitation patterns. Early researchers used synchronicity to infer causal relationships between cultural changes and climatic shifts. Recent work indicates a more complicated pattern in which some climatic shifts are contemporaneous with periods of population movement and upheaval, while other equally severe shifts are not accompanied by substantial archaeologically visible human responses. In this paper, case studies from the region demonstrate that prehistoric farmers adjusted their settlement and land use strategies in response to their own perceptions of below-average conditions, sometimes well below thresholds modern researchers might identify as causing food stress or other resource acquisition problems. Climate changes are one component in a complex relationship between human population size, history and intensity of landscape use, and social factors involved in farmers’ decisions to move or make other changes in their land use practices, and the strength of prehistoric reactions relative to different levels of stress varied widely. The importance of people’s perceptions of changing conditions in decision-making has implications both for understanding past culture changes and for planning effective responses to modern climate change.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Engaging with the Public and the Past: The Archaeological Legacy of Brian Fagan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage