Climate Adaptations in Persistent Places: Relational Solutions in Yucatán, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper focuses on the past 500 years of nearly continual human presence on the lands held today by residents of Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico. Previous work addressed why town residents continued to persist in this area despite the violence of colonialism. One answer pointed to significant human relationships with other-than-human beings and things. Drawing on new data—pollen and soil carbon isotope studies from sinkholes in this area—we examine trends in climate, cultivation, and biodiversity, comparing them to the results of previous studies of climate-linked carbonate oxygen isotopes and archival records. Preliminary results from lidar data analysis and groundtruthing contribute to assessment of how people moved across the landscape in response to periods of drought and other pressures from the colonial period (ca. 1540-1821) to the present day. A consistent challenge in explaining past human and other-than-human responses to climate has been to weigh the influences of environmental context, political regimes, technology, and other factors in landscape and livelihood changes. By considering the more recent past in a well-studied area, potential exists to track cause and effect and deepen understandings of how people persisted amid changing climates and politics through their relationships to plants, other non-human entities, and landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38357.0