Deb Nichols' Legacy of Mitigating Risk: 13,000 Years of Climate Change and Food-Security Strategies in the Great Plains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Deb Nichols' seminal work on agricultural risk mitigation demonstrates that food-security risk management has been crucial for human survival. This study builds on her legacy. Using a Human Behavioral Ecology perspective, we examine how pre-contact foraging and farming societies in the North American Great Plains navigated uncertainties brought by climate change between 13,000 and 1,000 years BP.

Utilizing the novel framework of "Dietary Portfolios," we draw from a comprehensive database of faunal remains from over 500 archaeological sites to explore resource-portfolio diversification as a bet-hedging strategy for managing food-security risk. We also investigate how specific climatic factors, such as temperature, precipitation, and seasonality, influenced these risk-mitigation strategies.

Our analyses reveal significant shifts in dietary strategies during periods of environmental stress. For example, we observe a greater emphasis on dietary portfolio diversification during climatic fluctuations. This indicates that pre-contact populations strategically alternated between resources to mitigate risk in response to climate and resource availability uncertainties.

These findings highlight the enduring importance of risk-management practices in human history, echoing the themes central to Deb Nichols' influential research. This study honors her contributions while building upon her insights into the critical role of risk-mitigation in human evolution, ecology, and societal development.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50015