Impact: the effect of climatic change on prehistoric and modern cultures in Texas (first progress report) (original) (raw)

Some remarks on climate impact on prehistoric societies

Vita Antiqua , 2020

In some archaeological studies there is a tendency emphasize climate with special strength as a driving force of cultural change in studies covering larger areas over longer periods of time. Migrations are often linked to climate change. In contrast, in small-region studies, researchers are more likely to explore internal factors of change, such as inequality and conflict. On the other hand, in publications postulating the impact of climate on changes in prehistoric societies, it is quite easy to notice the dependence of their authors on a specific theoretical option. For this reason, this article provides an overview of them (classical evolutionism, anthropogeography, culture-historical school, some processualists). For the same reason, selected examples of positive references to climate as a driving force for change and examples where researchers point to other causes are included here. The conclusion stated that even the best documented influence of climatic factors did not affect people directly. As a component of the natural environment that remains outside human culture, climate cannot influence migration or culture change directly. It is part of so called border conditions of cultural and civilizational phenomena, and it may be a necessary condition of cultural change, but never its sufficient condition. Reconstruction of necessary and sufficient conditions requires knowledge of images of the world prevalent in a given society, which involve moral and practical suggestions about how to solve organizational and legal problems in an essential framework of world – view and religion.

Warm climates of the past--a lesson for the future?

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2013

This Discussion Meeting Issue of the Philosophical Transactions A had its genesis in a Discussion Meeting of the Royal Society which took place on 10–11 October 2011. The Discussion Meeting, entitled ‘Warm climates of the past: a lesson for the future?’, brought together 16 eminent international speakers from the field of palaeoclimate, and was attended by over 280 scientists and members of the public. Many of the speakers have contributed to the papers compiled in this Discussion Meeting Issue. The papers summarize the talks at the meeting, and present further or related work. This Discussion Meeting Issue asks to what extent information gleaned from the study of past climates can aid our understanding of future climate change. Climate change is currently an issue at the forefront of environmental science, and also has important sociological and political implications. Most future predictions are carried out by complex numerical models; however, these models cannot be rigorously te...

Climate Change and the Neolithic in the American Southwest

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2022

The identification of the Roman Warm Period and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation by geoscientists and climate researchers over the past several decades and recognition of their role in shaping human history elsewhere have offered Southwestern archaeologists new tools for understanding how climatic changes may have contributed to the forager-to-farmer transition. Our study evaluates the possible effects of climate change and severe drought conditions across the region with respect to the Colorado Plateau, Northern Rio Grande Valley, and Tucson Basin. Each area appears to be characterized by a separate historical trajectory that would serve as the foundation for the Neolithic societies that followed.

Climate and cultural history in the Americas: An overview

Climatic Change, 2007

There is abundant historical evidence that climatic extremes in the past have led to significant and sometimes severe societal impacts. The severity of these impacts depends on the intensity and duration of the climatic event, social organization, and the prevailing socioeconomic conditions at the time of the climatic extreme. In this issue of Climatic Change we present the results from 12 studies, which document climatic extremes on different time scales and provide interesting evidence for direct and indirect social impacts of climatic changes in the Americas during the pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern eras. 1 Introduction The complex interaction between climate variability and human history has received periodic scholarly attention over the last hundred years. Lately, the subject has attracted renewed interest in academic and popular literature, with several books published in the past few years that explore the nexus between human disasters and climate via the mediating effects of culture (e.g.,

Climate and Holocene culture change: some practical problems

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 1990

In recent years, not least through tree-ring studies for the Holocene and studies of oxygen isotope ratios in Foramenifera in deep-sea cores for the Pleistocene, both linked with radioactive chronometry, useful and well-dated information has become available for global temperature variations. Yet we seem at present little closer to understanding the climatic influences upon human settlement, or upon such major episodes in human existence as the agricultural revolution or the emergence of pastoral economies. In making reference to the developments in archaeological survey techniques over the past 20 years, and the increasing collaboration with geomorphologists and settlement geographers, I seek to highlight the gap in the chain of argument between data for global climatic parameters and impact on human communities. Where are the phytologists, the ecologists, the crop plant geographers? Where is the necessary focus upon the crucial themes of changing microclimates and changing agricul...

Holocene Climate Changes and Human Consequences

Handbook of Archaeological Sciences, 2nd ed. , 2023

One of the strengths of both archaeology and palaeoclimatology is their ability to identify long-term trends, recording changes that took place over centuries or millennia (Caseldine 2012). As human beings, we sense short-term changes in weather rather than longer-term variations of climate, and in our memory, we therefore recall individual years with unusually hot summers or snowy winters, or extreme weather events such as hurricanes. Even as the climate has demonstrably warmed during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we find it difficult to assess how much average conditions differ from those we experienced in our youth, if they feel different at all. Ideally, we should be able to operate a long zoom to separate short-term weather from longer-term changes in climate. However, this proves challenging, partly because our sources of information are not the same over different timescales (Roberts 2011). Over short timescales, we draw on information derived primarily from observation and monitoring, for example, via Earth-orbiting satellites. Extending the time frame alters our sources from personal experience to communal memory and oral tradition and from direct observation to documentary records, such as historical meteorological data. Changes over even longer centennial timescales are not easily comprehended in terms of human experience, and memory transforms into myth, while data sources shift to archaeological investigation and proxy methods of reconstructing past climates, such as tree rings and radiocarbon dating. Drawing back in time, therefore, shifts the disciplinary emphasis from the meteorologist to the climate historian and then to the prehistorian and the palaeoclimatologist. Even so, it is important to remember that people in the past sensed their external environment over the same sub-annual to decadal timescales that we experience today, not as the kind of multi-decadal mean value common in our palaeo/archaeo-data archives. Human societies have developed a wide range of strategies for coping with a variable natural environment that can lead to episodes of drought, frost, and flood, often linked to years of plenty and years of food scarcity. A Holocene perspective provides valuable insights into how human societies have coped with such climate changes in the past, some of them gradual (and therefore imperceptible), others more abrupt. At the heart of this is the debate about how far we have been slaves to climate, and how far changes in climate have been a prompt to human innovation. Methods and Approaches Global and regional climatic variations during the Holocene are recorded in a wide array of proxy data, some of them described in other chapters of this Handbook. There are numerous potential palaeoclimatic data sources, but some are more useful than others if we want to