How Archaeologists Can Identify Human Resilience and Vulnerability to Climatic Conditions

Summary

If interdisciplinary concepts such as resilience and vulnerability are to be useful to archaeologists, then understandable methods of identifying these complex social phenomena are needed. Archaeological approaches that use familiar methods and material indicators will encourage exploration of these interdisciplinary concepts. This presentation will demonstrate how both human resilience and vulnerability to climatic conditions can be identified using changes in residential abandonment rates and food storage behavior. When regional-scale and long-term data on these behaviors are compared to paleoclimatic records of changes in climatic conditions, resilience and vulnerability to these conditions can be identified, compared, and quantified. Examples and results of the application of the method in the North American Southwest will be presented.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage