Does Political Organization Impact the Severity of Population Recession?

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.

A critical question raised by 20 years of intensive archaeological research is: What processes drive the long-term expansion and rapid recession of human populations? In this poster, we test the hypothesis that variation in the violence of long-term population expansion and recession is caused by differences in the scale and inclusiveness of social and political integration. To test this hypothesis, we compare the population dynamics of case studies in Mesoamerica, the US Southwest/Northern Mexico, and eastern North America. We use large datasets of archaeological radiocarbon, estimates of resource production, and estimates of changes in public architecture to study the impact of political integration versus resource production on human population. This work allows us to test a general tradeoff between political integration that fuels short to medium term population growth but sets population systems up for population overshoots and decline.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40418.0