Climate Change and Local Socio-Ecological Systems in the Past along the Georgia Coast, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Modelling expected environmental conditions derived from past global climatic trends presents an issue of scale when linking the historical trajectory of past societies to climatic change. Global climate change influences local environmental conditions at scales critical to the contextualization of past human-environment relationships, either manifesting in expected ways or drastically diverging from them. This becomes especially challenging in highly dynamic coastal environments. This paper addresses the importance of localized paleoenvironmental reconstructions, how these deviate from global trends, and how the understanding of specific species responses to ecological drivers is imperative to investigating past socio-ecological systems, particularly how people make economic decisions regarding resource management strategies in the face of shifting ecological regimes. This paper discusses this within the context of the Georgia Coast, USA to evaluate trends in the vulnerability and resilience of fisheries and fisheries management strategies of both vertebrate and invertebrate resources, the primary resource base for US coastal people, over millennia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51152