‘Adaptive cycles’ and climate fluctuations: a case study from Linear Pottery Culture in western Central Europe

Gronenborn, Detlef; Strien, Hans-Christoph; Dietrich, Stephan; Sirocko, Frank

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.03.015

Cited by 59 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Such reorganization is generally expected among human populations with cumulative culture. In some cases, endogenous expansiongrowth dynamics may have temporarily increased societal resilience to changing rates of climate variability (e.g., during Linear Pottery Culture) (63). Therefore, on one hand, some societies tended to experience quantifiable loss of resilience that led to dramatic declines in population levels; on the other hand, other societies recovered to generate larger and presumably more resilient populations.…”

Section: Implications For Understanding the Causes Of Collapse Duringmentioning

confidence: 99%

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Downey

Haas

Shennan

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization-regime shiftmay exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8-4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse. We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse. Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined. We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns. The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science.archaeology | early warning signs | human paleodemography | Neolithic Europe | resilience A 2012 Special Issue in PNAS debates how analysis of historical collapse in ancient societies can contribute to sustainability science (1). Key themes include accounting for complexity and multicausality in instances of collapse, modeling, and predicting both short-and long-term environmental change and the importance of historical and archaeological case studies. Although significant progress has been made in measuring ecosystem resilience and predicting collapse (2), quantifying the resilience of human societies presents a major challenge for social science research (3, 4). Further, the use of archaeological data and EWS methods to predict known periods of collapse in ancient human societies (i.e., retrodiction) (5) remains largely unexplored. Resilience as we use the concept here is defined as the ability of a system to absorb change and recover from disturbance while maintaining relationships between populations or state variables (6). Recent developments in ecology point to a promising new direction that follows from the observation that ecosystem resilience tends to decrease in advance of regime shifts-major transitions among qualitatively distinct ecosystem states (7). Theoretical and empirical studies of nonhuman systems reveal that decreasing resilience is detectable via time series statistics term...

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Section: Implications For Understanding the Causes Of Collapse Duringmentioning

confidence: 99%

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Downey

Haas

Shennan

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…However, we believe that before proceeding to the implementation phase, a theoretical introduction of our proposed approach that frames transitions within resilience theory is required, and delivered in the current paper. Taken alone, none of the concepts presented here are new to archeology (see for example Redman 2005, Gronenborn et al 2014. However, their combined use and application to understanding the resilience of livelihood strategies, is a valuable and novel contribution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

Lancelotti¹,

Zurro²,

Whitehouse³

et al. 2016

E&S

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. 2016. Resilience of small-scale societies' livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production. Ecology and Society 21 (4) ABSTRACT. The origins of agriculture and the shift from hunting and gathering to committed agriculture is regarded as one of the major transitions in human history. Archeologists and anthropologists have invested significant efforts in explaining the origins of agriculture. A period of gathering intensification and experimentation and pursuing a mixed economic strategy seems the most plausible explanation for the transition to agriculture and provides an approach to study a process in which several nonlinear processes may have played a role. However, the mechanisms underlying the transition to full agriculture are not completely clear. This is partly due to the nature of the archeological record, which registers a practice only once it has become clearly established. Thus, points of transitions have limited visibility and the mechanisms involved in the process are difficult to untangle. The complexity of such transitions also implies that shifts can be distinctively different in particular environments and under varying historical and social conditions. In this paper we discuss some of the elements involved in the transition to food production within the framework of resilience theory. We propose a theoretical conceptual model in which the resilience of livelihood strategies lies at the intersection of three spheres: the environmental, economical, and social domains. Transitions occur when the rate of change, in one or more of these domains, is so elevated or its magnitude so large that the livelihood system is unable to bounce back to its original state. In this situation, the system moves to an alternative stable state, from one livelihood strategy to another.

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“…The arrival of the crop plants, the development of tools, and the onset of erosion show the emergence of the SES agrarian soil use. However, Gronenborn et al (2014) propose that during this phase of the general SES agrarian soil use, the Linear Pottery Culture underwent an entire adaptive cycle. This demonstrates that the adaptive cycle consists of different spatial and temporal scales that influence the system as a whole, and takes into account the smaller and faster cycles within social systems that influence the variables of a bigger adaptive cycle (Fath et al 2015).…”

Section: The R-phase Of the Adaptive Cycle: The Neolithic Transition mentioning

confidence: 99%

Soil cultures – the adaptive cycle of agrarian soil use in Central Europe: an interdisciplinary study using soil scientific and archaeological research

Teuber¹,

Ahlrichs²,

Henkner³

et al. 2017

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Today's global challenges (e.g., food security) are not unprecedented in human history. Starting with the Neolithic transition, the agricultural sector and society underwent several cultural and technological changes and endured natural challenges. These challenges and changes are analyzed by using the adaptive cycle metaphor and the social-ecological system as tools to show the complexity of human-environment interactions and their development. The analysis relies on archaeological, pedological, and botanical research, and demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary work. Agrarian soil use as a social-ecological system persisted in Central Europe for 7000 years and underwent an adaptive cycle from the Neolithic transition to industrialization. With agriculture's mechanization, a second adaptive cycle started. The resilience of agrarian soil use for thousands of years shows that agriculture, as a human-environmental interaction, is adaptive to change. Understanding past agricultural challenges and changes using archaeological and soil scientific data puts the present development into a new perspective. A cultural perspective on soils might trigger soil protection and sustainable land use in a technical as well as political domain. Applying social-ecological system and adaptive cycle concepts to this interdisciplinary reconstruction of agrarian soil use illustrates their usefulness for archaeology and soil science.

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‘Adaptive cycles’ and climate fluctuations: a case study from Linear Pottery Culture in western Central Europe

Cited by 59 publications

References 40 publications

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

Soil cultures – the adaptive cycle of agrarian soil use in Central Europe: an interdisciplinary study using soil scientific and archaeological research

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‘Adaptive cycles’ and climate fluctuations: a case study from Linear Pottery Culture in western Central Europe

Cited by 59 publications

References 40 publications

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Resilience of small-scale societies&#8217; livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

Soil cultures &#8211; the adaptive cycle of agrarian soil use in Central Europe: an interdisciplinary study using soil scientific and archaeological research

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Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

Soil cultures – the adaptive cycle of agrarian soil use in Central Europe: an interdisciplinary study using soil scientific and archaeological research