Understanding Past Human Securities, Sustainability, and Migration for a Climate-Changing World

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the 1200s–1400s CE in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest, tens of thousands of people were on the move—many leaving places where knowledge of landscapes had accrued at the scale of millennia. By the end of the 1400s, population levels had declined by about 50%. What conditions led to this migration and depopulation and what can we learn that will contribute to human adaptation to a climate-changing world? One contribution archaeology can make to the future is testing assumptions relied on by modern policies and using non-archaeological frameworks to investigate the past. Here we rely on the UN Development Programme’s human security framework, an approach built on efforts to realize a world free from fear, want, and indignity by decreasing human insecurities (environmental, political, health, etc.). The results presented affirm the relationships that inspire and inform this framework and associated policies: as insecurities increased, migration increased, and the sustainability of places decreased. Identifying archaeologically informed insights from the past for the future expands the spatial and temporal scales of landscape learning beyond individual human experiences—it is a new form of landscape learning possible and enabled by archaeology in the twenty-first century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36076.0