Social and Environmental Conditions Affecting Long-Term Human Vulnerability and Resilience to Drought

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Vulnerability assessments investigate the social, environmental, and economic characteristics of people and places to identify where people are expected to be the most vulnerable to a warming climate and its consequences. Identifying the sources of vulnerability to drought is an essential component of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change policies to aid adaptation and mitigation of climate change challenges, especially among smallholder farmers globally in arid to semiarid climates. The long-term demographic and paleoclimatic record of the North American Southwest can provide information on the characteristics that influenced both vulnerability and resilience to drought in the past. Specifically, who and where were people the most vulnerable and resilient to drought during the 1200 to 1450 CE period? The research presented will provide some answers to this question informed by a regional-scale, systematic, comparative correlation analysis of settlement locations, demographic characteristics, and environmental conditions, enabled by the cyberSW and SKOPE databases.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50038