Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security

This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the “weight” of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy

Style as a social strategy: Dimensions of ceramic stylistic variation in the ninth century northern Southwest.

The role of material culture style in cultural systems, particularly small-scale agricultural societies, is investigated. The research goal is to understand how style is used in social relations and thus to understand patterns of variation in prehistoric ceramic design style. Style is defined as an aspect of form determined by consistent choice. A model of the role of style in small-scale sedentary agricultural societies is developed. Style is viewed as a strategy for defining social units, exchanging information with socially distant persons, and symbolizing ritual contexts. Thus style should have a particularly important role in areas with aggregated settlements and high population density, and in ritual activities. Style is examined in terms of two dimensions of variation: structure and difference. Analyses involve black-on-white ceramic designs from the ninth century A.D. in the American Southwest. The Kayenta and Mesa Verde regions, including Black Mesa and Dolores, are compared. Only the Mesa Verde region had aggregated settlements and large-scale ritual facilities, and it had a greater population density. At Dolores the scale of social organization may have increased between A.D. 840 and 880. Style as structure is analyzed on whole and fragmentary vessels. A method is developed to determine to what extent the designs are rigidly structured or rule-bound. Designs on Kana'a B/W, a Kayenta ceramic type, are more rigidly structured than designs on Piedra B/W, a Mesa Verde type. Analysis of difference involves study of design attributes on sherds and vessels. Similarity between and diversity within assemblages are examined. Design diversity was greater in the Mesa Verde region than the Kayenta region. During the period of increased organization scale at Dolores, design diversity decreased. The greater diversity and greater structural flexibility observed in Mesa Verde region designs suggests a more active social role for style. The more standardized, less diverse designs in the Kayenta region are interpreted as isochrestic variation. The decrease in diversity associated with an increase in organizational scale at Dolores suggests that stylistic definition of small social units was de-emphasized when larger-scale integration developed.Ph.D.ArchaeologyNative American studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128519/2/9023561.pd

The human experience of social transformation: Insights from comparative archaeology.

Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This article instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the US Southwest and the North Atlantic. The transformations, including changes in human securities, were coded based on expert knowledge and data analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis techniques. Results point to the following conclusions: Major transformations, including collapses, generally have a strong and negative impact on human security; flexible strategies that facilitate smaller scale changes may ameliorate those difficulties. Community security is strongly implicated in these changes; strong community security may minimize other negative changes. The relationships among the variables are complex and multi-causal; while social transformation may lead to declines in human securities, declining conditions of life can also push people to transform their societies in negative ways. Results show that some societies are better able to deal with difficulties than others. One important policy implication is that community security and local conditions can be instrumental both in helping people to cope with difficulties and in staving off some of those difficulties. A multi-scalar approach is essential as we face the increasing problems of climate change in the decades ahead