1. Free and open to the public
Early warning signals of population collapse among European Neolithic societies (  BP)
Is it possible that one of humanity’s major technological advances—agriculture—failed to buffer against widespread social collapse during Europe’s Early Neolithic period? If so, what lesson can contemporary societies learn from the archaeological remains of this important phase in human evolution? In this talk, I analyze whether declining socio-ecological resilience presaged Early Neolithic collapse using recently developed quantitative indicators of declining resilience called early warning signals (EWS). Until recently, EWS have only been detected in carefully controlled biological experiments, paleoclimate proxies, and in simple biological and physical systems. In this talk, I present evidence that EWS can also be detected in human populations and are unlikely to be explained by a range of confounding factors. These new findings result from improvements in the integration of large-scale archaeological datasets, and computational and statistical advances that are narrowing the gap between archaeological data and theory. It is important that sustainability scientists consider how the generic mechanisms suggested by EWS can contribute to human demographic collapse, as well as the possibilities for developing new ways of detecting declining resilience in contemporary societies.
Friday, January 27, 2017
SHESC Building, Room 254
2:30pm
Free and open to the public
Sean Downey is an ecological anthropologist whose research explores the social and ecological dynamics of farming and foraging societies, past and present. Using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, his work focuses on analyzing system dynamics, feedback, scale, historical contingency, and emergence in project that span three sub-disciplines of anthropology including sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, and computational historical linguistics.