William J. Folan and the Climate Fascination

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We recall the moment that William J. Folan was struck by the Climate Fascination. In 1978 he had a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio and we were sharing an office. He suggested that JDG should do an article on Maya Lowlands climate change. JDG responded that Willie was the expert who should do that. It was like a light went off in his bald head. He prepared “Paleoclimatological Patterning in Southern Mesoamerica” that was published in the *Journal of Field Archaeology* in 1983. He discovered that measured by high-latitude glaciers, world cooling caused the lowlands to experience a series of historical droughts, wars, and famines. WJF proposed the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1992 and obtained a Secretaria de Desarrollo Social grant to prepare the Management Plan. Using modern data, we studied local variations of climate published in 1995 *Geoarchaeology* as “A Landscape Analysis of the Candelaria Watershed . . .”, and in 2000 “Three Rivers in Campeche . . .”. Causes of local variation differed from solar variation in the Candelaria to El Niño in Essequibo, Guyana, and deforestation at Champotón. Our presentation follows WJF’s key insights into global changes and Mesoamerican impacts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35617.0