Frequent disturbances enhanced the resilience of past human populations (original) (raw)
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Quaternary International
Collapse" is an engaging buzzword that captivates public interest; as such, the notion of demise remains a dominant theme in studies of ancient civilizations. Our textbooks teach that the Roman Empire and Han dynasty (to name a few oft-cited examples) crumbled, and some, like the Maya and the Harappan suddenly-if not mysteriously-disappeared. In this manner, studying archaeology is promoted as a basis of prognostication for our modern Anthropocene, the timeframe when human agency became ascendant and affected global change. Well established models of collapse suggested that cultural downfall was predicated by hydroclimate-driven ecological and environmental crises that were both unavoidable and insurmountable, and resulted in finite endpoints like abandonments and disappearances. Such deterministic or apocalyptic notions of societal collapses are appealing and tidy, but incomplete narratives. Emerging research has moved beyond simplistic and linear interpretations of antiquity, invoking anthropological paradigms of continuity, social resilience and transformation, as well as new methodological approaches for resolving how cultures may have assimilated, or coped by strategic adaptation, migration, socio-political reorganization or technological innovation. Interpretations of geoarchaeological records in context of environmental reconstructions underscore themes raised by post-processual anthropologists, such as the need to view cultural change as a continuum through environmental changes. With these themes in mind, we link selected examples of modern studies of many regions with a special focus on North African drylands with archaeological records that provide contexts for reconstructing how cultures coped. Formal resilience theory, built on concepts that were originally borrowed from ecology, offers more realistic frameworks for reconstructions of the past that enable us to ask nuanced questions about sustainability strategies during political transitions, socio-political crisis events like warfare and disease, crop collapse, soil loss, extreme weather (including hurricanes, floods, droughts), and resource availability. Resilience and persistence of cultures is a given, and is inherent in the progressive study of ancient cultures and modern societies living in marginal environments, and facing hydroclimate change, overpopulation, and scarcity of resources. As such, geoarchaeological studies are vital for unpacking the Anthropocene.
Resilience in the Neolithic: how people may have mitigated environmental change in prehistory
2013
Neolithic populations in Central Europe lived in a world of dynamic climate change. This paper explores human-environmental interactions in light of local environmental changes linked to human activity and small-scale climate change, with a case study from the 2011–12 investigations at two small early Late Neolithic settlements (c. 5000 BC) set along palaeomeanders of the Körös River in Békés County, Hungary. During the course of the Neolithic, this region saw complex development in social and settlement organization, including the nucleation of populations in large settlements and the continued reoccupation of living space. Utilizing archaeological and environmental data, we tackle the question of why these communities adopted different settlement systems, whether they maintained other cultural traditions, and how these choices may reflect efforts to mitigate environmental change. Historical ecology and the related concept of resiliency provide a conceptual approach to understanding the ways that human societies and the environment affect each other. By cultural resiliency, we mean the ability of a society to maintain and develop identity, knowledge and ways of making a living, despite challenges and disturbances, by resisting damage and recovering quickly. In this case, we speculate about ways that Neolithic populations on the Great Hungarian Plain triggered some kinds of environmental change, and how they coped with the combination of these and naturally occurring changes in palaeohydrology.
European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016
Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization—regime shift— may exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8–4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse. We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse. Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined. We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns. The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science. archaeology | early warning signs | human paleodemography | Neolithic Europe | resilience
Climate change and large-scale human population collapses in the pre-industrial era
Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2011
Aim It has long been assumed that deteriorating climate (cooling and warming above the norm) could shrink the carrying capacity of agrarian lands, depriving the human population of sufficient food. Population collapses (i.e. negative population growth) follow. However, this human-ecological relationship has rarely been verified scientifically, and evidence of warming-caused disaster has never been found. This research sought to explore quantitatively the temporal pattern, spatial pattern and triggers of population collapses in relation to climate change at the global scale over 1100 years.
Anthropogenic Disturbances and Resilience: A Message from the Past
2017
Despite of the number of studies that have been conducted, knowledge of past human activities on peatlands in Southeast (SE) Asia remains fragmented. Hence, anthropogenic activities on peatlands are considered to be recent. In order to see whether and how human conducted activities on peatland in the past, a palaeoecological study on peatland located close to archaeological site of Malayu Empire was undertaken. The results revealed that human activities on tropical peatland began over a millennium ago. By conducting logging, grazing and wild harvesting activities, human changed the vegetation composition and diminished the ecosystem ability to accumulate peat and carbon. Shortly after the abandonment of the site, the vegetation regenerated and the accumulation rate of carbon recovered.
Towards an antifragility framework in past human-environment dynamics
Nature: Humanities and Social Science Communications, 2023
Scholarship on human-environment interactions tends to fall under two headings: collapse or resilience. While both offer valid explanatory frameworks for human-environment dynamics, both view stress as a net negative that, if unchecked, disrupts systems in equilibrium. Societies either succumb to stress (and collapse) or overcome stress and persist (demonstrate resilience). We re-evaluate the role of stress and advocate for a non-equilibrium approach to the study of past human-environment interactions. We draw inspiration from Nasim Taleb's concept of 'antifragility', which posits a positive role of stress for increasingly complex systems. We apply antifragility as an explanatory framework to pre-Hispanic coastal Peru, where indigenous farmers adapted to the stresses of highly variable El Niño events through a variety of water management systems. Finally, we note that an antifragility approach highlights the beneficial role of stressors, and that avoiding stress altogether makes a system more fragile.
2012
Events during the last several years—such as Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and continuing droughts in Africa—vividly illustrate the vulnerability of human society to environmental disturbances. That vulnerability lies in both the nature and magnitude of hazards in the environment and in the configurations (institutions, policies, practices) of human societies. We unintentionally play an essential role in creating our vulnerabilities. The concepts of resilience and vulnerability in coupled socialecological systems have proved increasingly important for analyzing the human dimensions of environmental disturbance and change ( Janssen and Ostrom 2006)—in the sense of this book, how people experience “hazards.” For example, strong earthquakes in some regions of the world result in limited human suffering and infrastructure costs, while in others they are massively devastating in human life and property loss. The same can be said for disease, hur...
How environmental stress affected past societies is an area of increasing relevance for contemporary planning and policy concerns. The paper below examines a series of case studies that demonstrate that short-term strategies that sustain a state or a specific bundle of vested interests did not necessarily promote longer-term societal resilience and often increased structural pressures leading to systemic crisis. Some societies or states possessed sufficient structural flexibility to overcome very serious short-term challenges without further exacerbating existing inequalities. But even where efforts were made consciously to assist the entire
Quaternary International, 2017
Inferred European Holocene population size exhibits large fluctuations, particularly around the onset of farming. We attempt to find explanations for these fluctuations by employing the concept of cycling, especially that of the Adaptive Cycle. We base our analysis on chronologically and chorologically highly resolved ceramic and site data from the Linear Pottery culture (Germ. Linearbandkermik) of the early Neolithic of southwestern Central Europe. Typological seriation with dendrochronological anchor dates provides the age model for these data. Ceramic motifs are analysed with respect to the temporally changing diversity in decoration. The temporal sequence of major decoration motifs is interpreted as an indicator of social diversity: when stylistic diversity is low, social diversity is low and vice versa. The sequence of secondary decoration motifs is interpreted in terms of individual lineage emphasis: when this diversity is low, there is strong emphasis on individual lineage and vice versa. The diversity time series are complemented by a relative population size indicator derived from the count of occupational features. Diversity and population size share a shape that is typical for (part of) an Adaptive Cycle, and they differ in their positioning on the time axisdthey are time-lagged. By relating the different curves to the (metaphorical) stages of the Adaptive Cycle, we find that these cycles progress at non-identical speed in different aspects of a social system. By relating the social dynamics to well-dated and highly resolved climate fluctuation records, we find evidence that severe climate excursions shaped the location of tipping points in the social system and that these social tipping points precede inferred population decline by several generations.