FASB 295 and online.

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Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change threatens to destabilize human societies and global ecological systems. Indeed, climate change is already forcing mass migrations and producing harmful effects on food security and social stability. As such, a critically important initiative in climate change research concerns how human populations adapt, or fail to do so, with climate shocks. Successfully coping with climate shocks depends on the resiliency of human social and ecological systems, that is, the capacity of human societies to endure an exogenous shock and return to its previous state. While resilience is typically seen as a measure of adaptation to local shocks, I draw on coupled archaeological and paleoclimatological data from the ancient Andes to illustrate how short-term adaptive decisions can ultimately reduce long-term societal resilience. The results of this interdisciplinary research show how a series of short-term solutions to climate downturns and population pressure fostered prosperity in the short-term, while driving disease, warfare, and elevated mortality several generations later. This case study suggests that adaptation and resilience are not synonymous, cautions against processual strategies that aid in the short-term while creating downstream vulnerabilities, and presents possible solutions for dealing with modern climate-related challenges

Bio

I am a quantitative archaeologist and human ecologist interested in all the ways humans adapt to challenging circumstances. Whether climate shocks, resource-poor environments, population pressure, or violence, humans establish innovative, though not always successful, strategies for coping with hard times. My role as an archaeologist is to use our material remains to infer past human behavior within a perspective of human behavioral ecology. This means I am interested in the archaeological record for what it can tell us about behavior in relation to complex socio-ecological dynamics. I am particularly interested in why people so often resort to violent conflict, and its impacts on population health and resilience. I explore these issues using spatio-statistical models, big data, isotope chemistry, and other methods from environmental archaeology and bioarchaeology. My primary field sites are in the central Andes and western North America, but I have experience working with archaeological and contemporary populations around the globe.