Paleotemperature Reconstructions of the Upland United States Southwest for the Last 2,000 Years

Summary

While paleoclimate reconstructions have improved across the last decade, the data and models are often still difficult to access, process, and interpret. However, improvements in these techniques, and the increasing breadth of paleoclimatic proxies available have furthered our understanding of the effects of climate-driven variability on past societies. Here we introduce a model being implemented by the SKOPE Project—Synthesizing Knowledge Of Past Environments. This application (openSKOPE.org) allows users to select a geographical extent and time interval, and subsequently obtain paleotemperature reconstructions for a given climate parameter. We use pollen data from the Neotoma Paleoecological Database (neotomadb.org) to produce low-frequency temperature reconstructions from the Modern Analog Technique (MAT). MAT builds a relationship between modern climate data and associated modern pollen spectra, and relates this pairing to fossil pollen assemblages based on the use of an appropriate multivariate distance metric. While the application is designed to cover the continental United States, our initial efforts focus on the upland United States Southwest during the last 2000 years. The MAT reconstructions can be used to modify productivity reconstructions for temperature-sensitive plants such as maize within social-environmental models, and to explore a variety of questions surrounding social and cultural responses to climate change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20895