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Landscape Engineering Impacts the Long-Term Stability of Agricultural Populations

Human Ecology volume 49, pages 369–382 (2021)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 01 August 2021

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Abstract

Explaining the stability of human populations provides knowledge for understanding the resilience of human societies to environmental change. Here, we use archaeological radiocarbon records to evaluate a hypothesis drawn from resilience thinking that may explain the stability of human populations: Faced with long-term increases in population density, greater variability in the production of food leads to less stable populations, while lower variability leads to more stable populations. However, increased population stability may come with the cost of larger collapses in response to rare, large-scale environmental perturbations. Our results partially support this hypothesis. Agricultural societies that relied on extensive landscape engineering to intensify production and tightly control variability in the production of food experienced the most stability. Contrary to the hypothesis, these societies also experienced the least severe population declines. We propose that the interrelationship between landscape engineering and increased political-economic complexity reduces the magnitude of population collapses in a region.

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Funding

Our work is supported by Past Global Changes (PAGES), which in turn received support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (except JAB).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropology Program and The Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, UT, 84322, USA

    Jacob Freeman

  2. School of Sustainability and The School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA

    John M. Anderies

  3. Department of Biology and The Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, UT, 84322, USA

    Noelle G. Beckman

  4. Department of Anthropology and Center for Applied Archaeological Science, Boise State University, Boise, ID, 83725, USA

    Erick Robinson

  5. Anthropology Program, Utah State University, Logan, UT, 84322, USA

    Judson Byrd Finley & David Byers

  6. Sustainable Coastal Systems Cluster and National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA

    Jacopo A. Baggio

  7. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA

    Darcy Bird

  8. The School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA

    Christopher Nicholson

  9. Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    José M. Capriles

  10. CONICET/UTN (Instituto de Evolución, Ecología Histórica y Ambiente-IDEVEA), San Rafael, Argentina

    Adolfo F. Gil

  11. Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2, Concepción, Chile

    Eugenia Gayo

  12. Department of Ecology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Claudio Latorre

  13. Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Santiago, Chile

    Claudio Latorre

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  1. Jacob Freeman
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Correspondence to Jacob Freeman.

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Freeman, J., Anderies, J.M., Beckman, N.G. et al. Landscape Engineering Impacts the Long-Term Stability of Agricultural Populations. Hum Ecol 49, 369–382 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00242-z

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