Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society

Abstract

By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few generations but over the longue durée. Patterning between climatemediated environmental change and change in human societies has, however, been murky because of low spatial and temporal resolution in available datasets, and because of failure to model the effects of climate change on local resources important to human societies. In this paper we review recent advances in computational modeling that, in conjunction with improving data, address these limitations. These advances include network analysis, niche and species distribution modeling, and agent-based modeling. These studies demonstrate the utility of deep-time modeling for calibrating our understanding of how climate is influencing societies today and may in the future.climate change | archaeology | computational modeling | agent-based modeling

Leaf Wax δD and δ13C in Soils Record Hydrological and Environmental Information Across a Climatic Gradient in Israel

“…The influence of climate on biological and social human evolution has been an important research topic in recent decades. Efforts have often focused on reconstructing the local climatic and environmental contexts of central locations of human evolution (d'Alpoim Guedes et al, ; deMenocal, ; National Research Council, ; e.g., Potts, ; Quade, ). Isotopic analysis of leaf wax molecules from soil horizons (paleosols) and sediments from paleontological, paleoanthropological, and archaeological sites can potentially offer climatic and landscape context directly associated with the archaeological record (e.g., Magill et al, ; Uno et al, ).…”

Mapping Tasmania's cultural landscapes: Using habitat suitability modelling of archaeological sites as a landscape history tool

“…Despite these issues, our approach has provided robust insights into biogeographical patterns or Tasmanian Aboriginal archaeological sites. In partnership with the database custodians these patterns can be further refined by, for example, age‐classifying subsets of the AHR data and matching these to hindcast models of climate and vegetation distributions layers in order to compare and contrast spatial and ecological patterns of Tasmanian Aboriginal land use through time (d’Alpoim Guedes et al, ; Franklin et al, ). If applied in such a strategic manner, habitat suitability models have the potential to be a nuanced and powerful landscape history tool with which to test hypotheses about shifting spatial and ecological distributions of Tasmanian Aboriginal people through time.…”

“…Habitat suitability modelling builds quantitative models of site–environment (or species–environment) relationships from observational data and uses these to estimate habitat suitability—and by inference, likelihood of occurrence—across a landscape (Elith et al, ; Franklin, Potts, Fisher, Cowling, & Marean, ). Originally developed for ecological applications, habitat suitability modelling can be adapted to meet a wide range of purposes and has strong potential as a biogeographical, palaeoecological and archaeological tool (d’Alpoim Guedes, Crabtree, Bocinsky, & Kohler, ; Franklin et al, ).…”

Ancient DNA as a Tool for Navigating the Anthropocene

“…Archeological data have the potential to increase our understanding of environmental change beyond human memory and written records by reconstructing climates, environments, and landscapes (d'Alpoim Guedes ; Misarti et al. ; Ólafsdóttir et al.…”