Impacts of Abrupt Climate Change Events on Human Paleodemography in the Great Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A central question of research on prehistoric human-environment interaction concerns the role of abrupt versus gradual climate and environmental changes on human demography. This research requires high resolution, regional-scale paleoenvironmental records that provide researchers with the ability to discern variable spatial and temporal scales of ecosystem responses to climate change. Another requirement of this research is the development of human paleodemographic proxies that can be arrayed as continuous time series and directly compared to continuous time series generated from proxy paleoenvironmental data. In this presentation we compare radiocarbon proxies of human demography and high resolution paleoenvironmental records from different regions across the Great Basin. Results suggest regionally variable responses of human populations to abrupt and gradual climate and environmental change. This presentation advances knowledge of the specific scales of climate and environmental change driving human demography in the Great Basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33586