PeoPLE 3K: Understanding the Population Dynamics of the Americas in the Context of Regional and Global Environmental Change

Summary

From the civilizations in Easter Island to the Mayas or to the collapse of the prehistoric populations in the Great Basin, researchers have proposed a wide range of hypotheses to disentangle the causes and drivers behind such pronounced demographic change. PeoPLE (PalEOclimate and the PeoPLing of the Earth) 3K is a new working group recently created by Past Global Changes (PAGES) to examine in detail how environmental change over the last 3000 years has affected, either by facilitating population expansions or by promoting civilization collapse, past human demographic change. Our approach is to use a Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) approach to facilitate integration of population structural change (based on summed probability distribution curves created from archaeological databases) and past climate change impacts on the environment. Our approach further uses models developed by population ecologists to propose a new understanding of how climate and human population size interact through resource utilization over time. We illustrate these ideas with examples of population change and collapse from the high Andes, the Atacama Desert, the Great Basin and Easter Island.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22476