Village Growth, Emerging Infectious Disease, and the End of the Neolithic Demographic Transition in the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico

Phillips, David A.; Wearing, Helen J.; Clark, Jeffery J.

doi:10.1017/aaq.2018.3

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…For example, the adoption of agriculture caused several major biological changes in human societies, specifically health decline, physiological stress increase, nutrition decline, and birth rate increase, among others (Lambert, 2009; Larsen, 1995; Roosevelt, 1984). Notably, following the adoption of agriculture, populations experienced sudden population growth and aggregation into denser communities (Bocquet-Appel and Bar-Yosef, 2008; Gignoux et al., 2011; Lambert, 2009; Larsen, 1995; Li et al., 2009; Phillips et al., 2018; Shennan et al., 2013), which may suggest an increase in carrying capacity and a fitness-health tradeoff wherein populations are larger but less healthy (Lambert, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records

et al. 2020

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Questions regarding population stability among animals and plants are fundamental to population ecology, yet this has not been a topic studied by archeologists focusing on prehistoric human populations. This is an important knowledge gap. The fluctuation of human populations over decades to centuries – population instability – may constrain the expansion of human economies. A first step toward describing basic patterns of population stability would be to identify sizes of fluctuations through time, since smaller fluctuations are more stable than larger fluctuations. We conduct a biogeographic analysis of the long-term stability of human societies in North America using a continental scale radiocarbon dataset. Our analysis compares the stability of summed calibrated radiocarbon date probability distributions (SPDs) with subsistence strategies and modeled climate stability between 6000 and 300 BP. This coarse-grained analysis reveals general trends regarding the stability of human systems in North America that future studies may build upon. Our results demonstrate that agricultural sequences have more stable SPDs than hunter-gatherer sequences in general, but agricultural sequences also experience rare, extreme increases and decreases in SPDs not seen among hunter-gatherers. We propose that the adoption of agriculture has the unintended consequence of increasing population density and stability over most time scales, but also increases the vulnerability of populations to large, rare changes. Conversely, hunter-gatherer systems remain flexible and less vulnerable to large population changes. Climate stability may have an indirect effect on long-term population stability, and climate shocks may be buffered by other aspects of subsistence strategies prior to affecting human demography.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records

et al. 2020

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“…At this coarse-grained scale, it appears that the relatively contemporaneous boom and bust pattern across different environmental contexts shows that human populations were saturating landscapes throughout Utah and Wyoming during the late Holocene. Whereas early and middle Holocene populations were able to move freely among different environmental contexts because they were sparsely populated, late Holocene populations had to contend with landscapes that were fully populated—which, we propose, initiated new population ecology processes guided more by endogenous social-ecological, and perhaps epidemiological (e.g., Phillips et al 2018), processes. This might be attributed to both the impact of the spread of domesticated plants into certain zones (Simms 2008) and large-scale migration into the region (e.g., Madsen and Simms 1998; Thomas 2019).…”

Section: Results: Paleodemography and Paleoclimatementioning

confidence: 90%

The Importance of Spatial Data to Open-Access National Archaeological Databases and the Development of Paleodemography Research

Robinson

Nicholson

Kelly

2019

Adv. archaeol. pract.

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With generous support from the National Science Foundation, we have spent the past four years developing an archaeological radiocarbon database for the United States. Here, we highlight the importance of spatial data for open-access, national-scale archaeological databases and the development of paleodemography research. We propose a new method for analyzing radiocarbon time series in the context of paleoclimate models. This method forces us to confront one of the central challenges to realizing the full potential of national-scale databases: the quality of the spatial data accompanying radiocarbon dates. We seek to open a national discussion on the use of spatial data in open-source archaeological databases.

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“…Indeed, not only do we see corresponding declines in the radiocarbon and dendrochronological records at this large scale, but these patterns are also consistent with previous work on demographic and social change in the American Southwest: the Coalescent Communities Database, a Southwest-wide database of room counts and occupation spans of habitation sites with 12 rooms or more, supports a ‘population decline that began between AD 1300 and 1350 and continued to European contact’ (Hill et al . [ 24 ], figs 2 and 4) [ 36 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dendrochronological dates confirm a Late Prehistoric population decline in the American Southwest derived from radiocarbon dates

Robinson

Bocinsky

Bird

et al. 2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The northern American Southwest provides one of the most well-documented cases of human population growth and decline in the world. The geographic extent of this decline in North America is unknown owing to the lack of high-resolution palaeodemographic data from regions across and beyond the greater Southwest, where archaeological radiocarbon data are often the only available proxy for investigating these palaeodemographic processes. Radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest suggest widespread population collapses from AD 1300 to 1600. However, radiocarbon data have potential biases caused by variable radiocarbon sample preservation, sample collection and the nonlinearity of the radiocarbon calibration curve. In order to be confident in the wider trends seen in radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest, here we focus on regions that have multiple palaeodemographic proxies and compare those proxies to radiocarbon time series. We develop a new method for time series analysis and comparison between dendrochronological data and radiocarbon data. Results confirm a multiple proxy decline in human populations across the Upland US Southwest, Central Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande from AD 1300 to 1600. These results lend confidence to single proxy radiocarbon-based reconstructions of palaeodemography outside the Southwest that suggest post-AD 1300 population declines in many parts of North America. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

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Village Growth, Emerging Infectious Disease, and the End of the Neolithic Demographic Transition in the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico

Cited by 9 publications

References 41 publications

A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records

A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records

The Importance of Spatial Data to Open-Access National Archaeological Databases and the Development of Paleodemography Research

Dendrochronological dates confirm a Late Prehistoric population decline in the American Southwest derived from radiocarbon dates

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