Understanding the emergence of alternative social-ecological regimes of food production

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Innovation and Population Dynamics in Drylands" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Progressive models of cultural evolution have long been criticized. Yet, archaeologists sometimes struggle to replace these models with non-linear theories of cultural change that (1) explain the diversity of food production strategies observed over time and (2) provide propositions amenable to empirical testing. In this paper, we explore a non-linear theory of cultural change that predicts the emergence of diverse social-ecological regimes of food production. We use the model to compare the Long-Neolithics evidenced on the Colorado Plateau, where populations integrated maize into indigenous cultivation strategies, and the Edwards Plateau in Central Texas, where populations rejected maize and invested in wild geophyte harvest during the Late Holocene. We document the similarities and differences in population growth, resource investment, and social integration in the two regions. The comparison reveals a common trajectory of change in place based infrastructure development and population growth. We speculate that common mechanisms related to social signaling and the production of surplus food by hearth groups/households may underlie the commonalities of these regions’ Long-Neolithic trajectories. Conversely, the different potential productivity of geophytes in these regions may have been critical initial conditions that initiated distinct forms of food production and social-ecological incentives for adopting or rejecting maize agriculture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Innovation and Population Dynamics in Drylands

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52813