Four Thousand Years of Disaster, Vulnerability, and Resilience in the Lower Yellow River, China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For the past 4,000 years, humans have assaulted the environments of the lower Yellow River Valley. For millennia this region has been an entirely cultivated and (mis)managed anthropogenic landscape. Indeed, the lower Yellow River is called the “river of sorrow” and flows through a land of famine. At the same time, though, it is a land of remarkable resilience. Today this area is home to some of the densest populations on earth and is a self-evident human success story. How do we understand this paradox of vulnerability and resilience? The lower Yellow River valley provides an instructive case study for exploring long-term interactions of societies and their environments. Specifically, this region provides an opportunity to think about the nature of human adaptive capacity in the face of repeated natural disasters. Using archaeological and historical data on long-term human-environmental interactions from the end of the Neolithic into the Dynastic period, I document how shifting human and environmental fortunes are literally and metaphorically sedimented in the alluvial floodplain. This work illustrates how success and failure are contextual; these states are the outcome of human choices and transformations of social and environmental relations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37772.0