PEOPLE 3K (PalEOclimate and the PeopLing of the Earth): Investigating Tipping Points Generated by the Climate-Human Demography-Institutional Nexus over the Last 3000 Years

Summary

One of the least understood aspects of paleoscience is the interplay between climate, human demography, and how changes in population influence resource management strategies. With the goal of understanding such processes, we created the PEOPLE 3000 research network to study trade-offs inherent to the climate-human population-institutional adaptation system over the last 3000 years. We propose that strategies reducing variation in food production and institutions for protecting those strategies generate ever more complex socio-ecological systems (SES). The growth of complexity, accompanied by a loss in social and subsistence diversity, can result in major reorganizations due to external or internal changes that drive a SES across a critical threshold. We explore this proposition using case-studies from the Great Basin, northern Chile and western Argentina. We compare radiocarbon SPDs with records of palaeoecological change, and changes in the diversity of subsistence and social strategies. The results show that population increased from 2000 to 800 BP in all three locations, and populations declined and societies reorganized between 700-550 BP. Our analysis reveals possible trade-offs associated with simultaneous adaptation to population growth and climate change and provides a more informed position to understand relationships between social-ecological parameters and threshold changes in modern SES.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20706