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

Abstract

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

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“…Archaeology's contribution in this sense is twofold, in that it documents both cultigens and the tools and techniques used to cultivate and process them (123). Similar studies combining climate and human behavioral modeling with experimental farming have been conducted in the American Southwest in collaboration with Hopi maize farmers (124)(125)(126) and the long-term coevolutionary relationship between Indigenous people and food webs in Australia (127).…”

Buffering new risks? Environmental, social and economic changes in the Turkana Basin during and after the African Humid Period

“…Since then, discussions of risk have continued in both archaeology and human ecology (e.g. Bliege Bird et al, 2002; Cashdan, 1990; Halstead and Jones, 1989; Miller et al, 2011; Strawhacker et al, 2020; Winterhalder, 2007; Zavodny et al, 2017).…”

Risky business: Comparative approaches to risk and resilience in arid environments of the Holocene – An introduction to the special issue

“…Past peoples either figured out suitable strategies for managing risks (e.g. long term storage of maize or trade to ensure food security in the US Southwest (Spielmann et al, 2011; Strawhacker et al, 2020), or their systems failed and they had to cope with loss, displacement, and/or reestablishment (e.g. Costanza et al, 2007; Freeman et al, 2017 ; Nelson et al, 2012; White et al, 2014)).…”