Global and Regional Frameworks for Comparing Agricultural Intensification and Productivity Across Cases

Summary

Understanding variation in the stability and productivity of subsistence strategies is fundamental to explaining patterns of variation in long-term human demography. This poster addresses under what conditions societies intensify food production at both global and regional scales using frameworks ranging from relatively abstract environmental measures to models based on detailed historical and archaeological data relating to agricultural productivity. At a global scale, the combination of effective temperature zones and aquatic resource availability is shown to condition broad patterns in the pace of intensification in a comparison of 14 archaeological sequences. Crop yield models using climatic, historical and archaeological data as inputs provide a framework for comparing changes in carrying capacity over time among archaeological cases from Latium (Italy), Kansai (Japan), and Oaxaca (Mexico). At a regional scale, a model of alternative agricultural strategies in the Maya Lowlands is used to predict which environmental variables explain regional variability in the rate and demographic thresholds of agricultural intensification. Together, we demonstrate the value of using frameworks at different levels of precision to compare archaeological cases at different spatial scales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• PAGES (Past Global Changes) PEOPLE 3000 - PalEOclimate and the PeopLing of the Earth   •
• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20827