Resilience in an Arid Environment: Long-Term Climate Change and Human Adaptations in Sonora

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent interdisciplinary investigations have revealed that the Sonoran Desert region is not only one of the earliest regions occupied in the Americas, but also demonstrates one of the longest continuous occupation records. The earliest Sonorans were proboscidean hunters in the Late Pleistocene, highly-mobile Archaic foragers and hunters in the Early and Middle Holocene and maize farmers in the Late Holocene. Several archaeological sites in the Sonoran Desert region have a well-preserved archaeological record with stratigraphic deposits that cover the last 15,000 years. Based upon multiple sources of evidence (pedological data, pollen samples, macrobotanical remains, and cultural materials) primarily from the La Playa, Fin del Mundo, El Aígame and El Gramal sites, along with Uto-Aztecan linguistic models, we explore the mechanisms implemented by the inhabitants of the desert to survive the climatic oscillations recurrent during the Holocene and how these adaptations permitted them to thrive in their cultural landscape. This paper summarizes the longue durée of climate change and human occupations and their varied adaptations represented in the archaeological record of Sonora, Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23115