A Review of Paleodemographic Changes in Prehispanic Bolivia Using a Countrywide Assessment of Radiocarbon Dates

Summary

In this poster, I introduce a new database containing the most updated and comprehensive series of geo-referenced radiocarbon dates collected from archaeological sites located within the entire country of Bolivia. The resulting Bolivian Radiocarbon Database reviews and incorporates data from previous syntheses as well as a number of additional dates mostly available in rare publications and recent research. Using recommendations posted in previous studies, I discuss some of the potential and limitations of the resulting series, including geographical and temporal biases. I then select a dataset of representative dates to generate a series of different sum probability curves for different ecological regions (highlands, inter-Andean valleys, and lowlands) and compare them to different sequences of paleoenvironmental change. I discuss the results in light of the questions and hypotheses posted by the PEOPLE 3K Working Group, including the impact of global scale processes of climate change such as the Medieval Warm Anomaly and the onset of the Little Ice Age to different food production systems, and their influence on trajectories of demographic change.

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): 21048