The history of climate and society: a review of the influence of climate change on the human past

D Degroot, KJ Anchukaitis, JE Tierney… - Environmental …, 2022 - iopscience.iop.org
Recent decades have seen the rapid expansion of scholarship that identifies societal
responses to past climatic fluctuations. This fast-changing scholarship, which was recently …

p3k14c, a synthetic global database of archaeological radiocarbon dates

D Bird, L Miranda, M Vander Linden, E Robinson… - Scientific Data, 2022 - nature.com
Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human
demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded …

Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale

AE Thompson, JP Walden, ASZ Chase, SR Hutson… - PloS one, 2022 - journals.plos.org
Many humans live in large, complex political centers, composed of multi-scalar communities
including neighborhoods and districts. Both today and in the past, neighborhoods form a …

Drought-induced civil conflict among the ancient Maya

DJ Kennett, M Masson, CP Lope, S Serafin… - Nature …, 2022 - nature.com
The influence of climate change on civil conflict and societal instability in the premodern
world is a subject of much debate, in part because of the limited temporal or disciplinary …

[HTML][HTML] Molecular evidence for human population change associated with climate events in the Maya lowlands

B Keenan, A Imfeld, K Johnston, A Breckenridge… - Quaternary Science …, 2021 - Elsevier
The analysis of faecal stanols in lake sediment cores offers a novel opportunity to
reconstruct human population change, assuming that variability in faecal stanol …

Collapse and continuity: A multi-proxy reconstruction of settlement organization and population trajectories in the Northern Fertile Crescent during the 4.2 kya Rapid …

D Lawrence, A Palmisano, MW de Gruchy - PloS one, 2021 - journals.plos.org
The rise and fall of ancient societies have been attributed to rapid climate change events.
One of the most discussed of these is the 4.2 kya event, a period of increased aridity and …

Sum things are not what they seem: Problems with point-wise interpretations and quantitative analyses of proxies based on aggregated radiocarbon dates

WC Carleton, HS Groucutt - The Holocene, 2021 - journals.sagepub.com
Radiocarbon-date assemblages are commonly used as proxies for past human and
environmental phenomena. Prominent examples of target phenomena include past …

A model-based approach to the tempo of “collapse”: The case of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

RJ DiNapoli, TM Rieth, CP Lipo, TL Hunt - Journal of Archaeological …, 2020 - Elsevier
Abstract Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) presents a quintessential case where the tempo of
investment in monumentality is central to debates regarding societal collapse, with the …

Measuring inequality: The effect of units of analysis on the Gini coefficient

AE Thompson, ASZ Chase, GM Feinman - Ancient Mesoamerica, 2023 - cambridge.org
To variable degrees, inequality is present in all human societies, but how archaeologists
measure inequality varies greatly. In recent research, we used the same unit of analysis …

Decline in seasonal predictability potentially destabilized Classic Maya societies

T Braun, SFM Breitenbach, V Skiba… - … earth & environment, 2023 - nature.com
Classic Maya populations living in peri-urban states were highly dependent on seasonally
distributed rainfall for reliable surplus crop yields. Despite intense study of the potential …