Landscape Engineering Impacts the Long-Term Stability of Agricultural Populations

Freeman, Jacob; Anderies, John M.; Beckman, Noelle G.; Robinson, Erick; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Bird, Darcy; Nicholson, Chris; Finley, Judson Byrd; Capriles, José M.; Gil, Adolfo; Byers, David; Gayó, Eugenia M.; Latorre, Claudio

doi:10.1007/s10745-021-00242-z

Cited by 15 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…For decades, scholars and scientists have tried to understand why complex societies get to and collapse, and transform into new sociopolitical and ethnic entities [72, 73]. Our results may seem to support the view that societal changes in the Central Andes Centers are related to mutual feedback between population growth and social complexity [e.g., 74].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

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1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes

Lima

Gayó

Gurruchaga

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Different Andean societies underwent processes of expansion and collapse during propitious or adverse climate conditions, resource boost or depletion along with population variations. Previous studies have emphasized that demographic collapses of polities in the Central Andes Area were triggered by warfare and the negative impacts of fluctuating climate (droughts) on crop productivity. Nevertheless, the interactions between climatic variability, demography and warfare have been less thoroughly evaluated. We develop population dynamic models to test feedback relationships between population growth, climate change and warfare in the Central Andes, where considerable regional hydroclimate variations have occurred over a millennium. Through population models, we found out that the rise and demise of social polities in the northern coast of the Central Andes appear to be a consequence of climate change. In contrast, for the highlands of Peru and the Titicaca basin, population models suggest that warfare intensity has a negative effect on population growth rates.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

“…For decades, scholars and scientists have tried to understand why complex societies get to and collapse, and transform into new sociopolitical and ethnic entities [72,73].…”

Section: -Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes

Lima

Gayó

Gurruchaga

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Moving forward, we speculate that adaptive capacity tradeoffs are most important in environments where human populations specialize, such as on geophytes in Central Texas, or rice agriculture in Wood's example. Where landscapes become highly managed to produce just a few critical resources over thousands of years, then we expect populations to become much more vulnerable to intensification driven population overshoots and recessions (Freeman et al, 2021a). Conversely, where populations maintain more diverse production systems, then we should expect less path dependence over thousands of years in the cultural evolution of social organization and physical infrastructure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeated long-term population growth overshoots and recessions among hunter-gatherers

et al. 2023

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We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human populations: The intensification of production generates a tradeoff between the adaptive capacity of individuals to generate a surplus of energy to maximize their fitness in the short-run and the long-term capacity of a population as a whole to experience a smooth transition into a demographic equilibrium. The model reconciles the conflicting insights of dynamic systems models of human population change, and we conduct a preliminary test of this model’s implications in Central Texas by developing time-series that estimate changes in human population density, modeled ecosystem productivity, human diet, and labor over the last 12,500 years. Our analysis indicates that Texas hunter-gatherers experienced three long-term population growth overshoots and recessions into quasi equilibria. Evidence indicates that each of these overshoots and recessions associate with changes in diet and labor devoted to processing high density, lower quality resources to unlock calories and nutrients. Over the long-term, population recessions may be necessary for populations to experiment with social and physical infrastructure changes that raise the carrying capacity of their environment.

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“…At the same time, both strong ties and collaborative arrangements among householders build bonds of collective action and domestic investments in infrastructural sunk costs or landesque capital (Widgren, 2007;Carballo et al, 2022). If maintained, these investments provide economic benefits that become disincentives to community dissolution and out-migration (Freeman et al, 2021). In prehispanic Mesoamerica, intra-community, household collaborations were significant as both agricultural and craft production were situated in domestic units (e.g., Feinman, 1999).…”

Section: Historical Institutionalism and Key Emergent Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

Feinman

Carballo²,

Nicholas³

et al. 2023

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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During the last millennium BCE, central places were founded across many regions of western (non-Maya) Mesoamerica. These early central places differed in environmental location, size, layout, and the nature of their public spaces and monumental architecture. We compare a subset of these regional centers and find marked differences in their sustainability--defined as the duration of time that they remained central places in their respective regions. Early infrastructural investments, high degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between domestic units, and collective forms of governance are found to be key factors in such sustainability.

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Landscape Engineering Impacts the Long-Term Stability of Agricultural Populations

Cited by 15 publications

References 65 publications

1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes

1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes

Repeated long-term population growth overshoots and recessions among hunter-gatherers

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

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