A Landscape Perspective on Climate-Driven Risks to Food Security: Exploring the Relationship between Climate and Social Transformation in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest

Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time

p3k14c, a synthetic global database of archaeological radiocarbon dates.

Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecology and the evolution of social-ecological systems across the Earth. However, these databases have been developed using different sample selection criteria, which has resulted in interoperability issues for global-scale, comparative paleo-demographic research and integration with paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental data. We present a synthetic, global-scale archaeological radiocarbon database composed of 180,070 radiocarbon dates that have been cleaned according to a standardized sample selection criteria. This database increases the reusability of archaeological radiocarbon data and streamlines quality control assessments for various types of paleo-demographic research. As part of an assessment of data quality, we conduct two analyses of sampling bias in the global database at multiple scales. This database is ideal for paleo-demographic research focused on dates-as-data, bayesian modeling, or summed probability distribution methodologies

Open science in archaeology

No abstract available

Is a bird in hand really worth two in the bush? models of turkey domestication on the Colorado Plateau

In this thesis, I explore the relationships between turkeys and humans in the Pueblo Southwest as a means of understanding how human agency directs the process of domestication. The models presented here define potential decisions made by human agents during the process of domestication, and describe how we might expect these decisions to pattern the archaeological record of domestication. I begin by describing the genetic and demographic implications of turkey domestication for turkey flocks, noting that variations in the treatment of turkey—feeding, breeding, and use—should generate distinguishable archaeogenetic signatures. In the second part, I imagine the adoption of turkey domestication as a resilience trap—the ‘Avicultural Trap’—making the Pueblo subsistence system increasingly rigid and narrow while simultaneously allowing explosive population growth. I describe how a feedback loop between turkey, maize yields, and human population growth amplified to the point where the Pueblo subsistence system was unable to respond to climate-induced reduction in agricultural yield. In the final section, I focus on ‘domestication’ as food production and incorporate domestication into the patch-choice model from classic optimal foraging theory. I implement that model in the Village simulation, and generate further expectations of the spread of the adoption of domestication. These include the prediction that domestication likely spread outwards from the most agriculturally productive areas of the landscape, and may have been less enthusiastically embraced in areas with other available high-quality protein resources

bocinsky/asian_niche: Setting up Zenodo archiving

This is a pre-release version of the code supporting d'Alpoim Guedes, Jade and R. Kyle Bocinsky. Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia. Submitted to Nature

VEPI_data.zip

These are the data used in the Village Ecodynamics Project "Village" computer simulation of ancestral Pueblo farming families in southwestern Colorado. These data confirm to the VEP I study area. Any site location data has been scrubbed

ropensci/FedData: FedData version 2.4.6 CRAN release

This is the FedData version 2.4.6 CRAN release, and the first release as part of ROpenSci. For documentation, see http://ropensci.github.io/FedData

13. Crises as Opportunities for Culture Change

In 1927, prominent southwestern archaeologist A.V. Kidder invited some three dozen archaeologists and a few other scientists, accompanied by assorted family members, to meet at Pecos, New Mexico and attempt to “arrive at an understanding in regard to underlying problems, the methods of accumulating and presenting data, and (last, but in some ways most important) a standardised nomenclature for artifacts, decorative motifs, and periods of culture” (letter from Kidder to Clark Wissler [Woodbury..

Data output for: Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia, in review.

<p>The GitHub repository for this project does not contain the output<br> generated by the script—3.2 GB of compressed data. All output data is<br> available as this Zenodo archive.</p> <p>The `vignettes/` directory contains all data generated by the<br> `guedesbocinsky2018.Rmd` RMarkdown vignette:</p> <p>  - `data/raw_data` contains data downloaded from web sources for this<br>     analysis<br>   - `data/derived_data/` contains tables of the raw site chronometric<br>     data without locational information, and the modeled chronometric<br>     probability and niche information for each site.<br>   - `data/derived_data/models/` contains R data objects describing the<br>     Kriging interpolation models across the study area<br>   - `data/derived_data/recons/` contains NetCDF format raster bricks of<br>     the model output (i.e., the reconstructed crop niches)<br>   - `figures/` contains all figures output by the script, including<br>     videos of how each crop niche changes over time<br>   - `figures/site_densities/` contains figures of the estimated<br>     chronometric probability density for each site in our database<br>   - `submission/` contains all of the figures, tables, movies, and<br>     supplemental datasets included with d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky<br>     (2018)</p