Approximate Bayesian Computation Evaluation of the Interactive Effects of Climate Change and Subsistence Economic Intensification on Precontact Population Dynamics in Western North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Past population change is connected to significant shifts in human behavior and experience, including landscape manipulation, subsistence change, sedentism, technological change, material inequality, and more. However, population change appears to result from a complex interplay of human-environment interactions that feedback on each other, influencing and simultaneously impacted by processes such as subsistence intensification and climate change. Here we explore complex system dynamics of population change using theoretical and Approximate Bayesian Computational modeling combined with the archaeological record of the past 4,000 years in the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin regions of western North America as case studies to identify causal relationships and the different manners in which climate change may have interplayed with subsistence economic intensification and population dynamics. Using standard distance metric evaluation on the performance of 1,000,000 simulations compared with reconstructed past population sizes in each region reveals how climate change impacting landscape productivity can influence carrying capacity and structure population growth such that, when populations reach carrying capacity (Malthusian ceilings), intensification in their subsistence economy can send feedbacks into the socioecological system spurring rapid, differential, population growth. Comparisons of the two regions highlights how varied socioecological circumstances can produce alternative pathways to, and limitations on, population expansions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38964.0