Dynamic influences of climate change on prehistoric lifeways in the Americas

Modern climate change threatens to destabilize the planet's physical, biological and social systems (IPCC, 2014, 2021) with ongoing changes already having measurable impacts on society (Callaghan et al., 2021), food insecurity (Koren et al., 2021; Vesco et al., 2021), social unrest (Hsiang et al., 2013; Adger et al., 2014; Burke et al., 2015; Koubi, 2019), and mass migration (Cattaneo et al., 2019; Kaczan and Orgill-Meyer, 2020; Clement et al., 2021). Further, the world appears to be approaching socioecological tipping points poised to accelerate the current rate of change and amplify impacts (e.g., Lenton et al., 2008, 2019; Rockström et al., 2009), which are likely to disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, in particular those reliant upon subsistence agriculture, pastoralism, and aquaculture (Rapsomanikis, 2015; Lowder et al., 2021; FAO et al., 2022). Addressing these complex socioecological dynamics requires targeted interventions, studies of modern impacts, and predictions of likely scenarios based upon long-term studies. Many studies of climate influences on human-environment interactions focus on the last century, when conditions were relatively stable and socioecological systems were established. The shallow time-depth and narrow range of variation observed in recent history, which systematically excludes greater cultural and ecological diversity than existed in the past (Hegmon et al., 2018; Douglass and Cooper, 2020; Kohler and Rockman, 2020; Rick and Sandweiss, 2020; Scarborough and Isendahl, 2020; Burke et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2023), impacts predictive outcomes. However, the archaeological record provides useful for identifying underlying patterns in responses to climate change through explorations of long-term human-climate dynamics that lead to resilience and vulnerabilities across broad cultural and ecological diversity (Johnson et al., 2005; Van Der Leeuw et al., 2011; d’Alpoim Guedes et al., 2016).

The papers in this Special Issue are centered around this theme, using the archaeological record to explore human-environment dynamics in the contexts of climatic change in the Americas. Specifically, these papers advance quantitative approaches for generating novel, replicable, methods for exploring and quantifying the dynamics of how climate change has influenced a) human settlement and movement, b) subsistence economic resource procurement and intensification, and c) conflict and violence in ways that synthetically link to climate change resilience. Climate change and human responses have had drastic impacts on natural vegetation and key subsistence economic resources across the temporal span of human occupation in the Americas (Piperno, 2006; Grimm et al., 2011). Particularly poignant for anticipating human responses, climate driven alterations of local environments often led to key changes in resource distributions, incentivizing people to shift where they settled and lived (Polyak et al., 2022; Sandweiss and Maasch, 2022; Codding et al., 2024, this volume; Jazwa and Zoellner, 2024, this volume; Yaworsky et al., 2024, this volume). Movement of resources, ecological niches, and people then impact economic decision making around resource procurement, both in terms of types of resources acquired and changes in production investment (Cole et al., 2024, this volume; Peralta et al., 2024, this volume; Ray et al., 2024, this volume; Wilson et al., 2024, this volume), which themselves can have significant impacts on social aspects of life including material inequality (e.g., Mattison et al., 2016; Wilson and Codding, 2020), territoriality (e.g., Dyson-Hudson and Smith, 1978; Jazwa et al., 2019), social organization (e.g., Kaplan et al., 2009), health, fertility and mortality (e.g., Page et al., 2016; McCool et al., 2024, this volume), and conflict (e.g., Glowacki and Wrangham, 2013; Allen et al., 2016; Brown et al., 2024, this volume; Noe et al., 2024, this volume).