Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Landscape Engineering Impacts the Long-Term Stability of Agricultural Populations

  • Published:
Human Ecology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

A Correction to this article was published on 01 August 2021

This article has been updated

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

References

  • Allen AP, Li BL, Charnov EL (2001) Population fluctuations, power laws and mixtures of lognormal distributions. Ecology Letters 4(1):1–3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderies JM (1998) Culture and human agro-ecosystem dynamics: the tsembaga of new guinea. Journal of theoretical biology 192(4):515–530

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderies JM (2006) Robustness, institutions, and large-scale change in social-ecological systems: the Hohokam of the Phoenix Basin. Journal of institutional economics 2(2):133–155

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderies JM, Hegmon M (2011) Robustness and resilience across scales: Migration and resource degradation in the prehistoric US Southwest. Ecology and Society 16(2):22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderies JM, Mathias JD, Janssen MA (2019) Knowledge infrastructure and safe operating spaces in social–ecological systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(12):5277–5284

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bandy MS (2005) Energetic efficiency and political expediency in Titicaca Basin raised field agriculture. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24(3):271–296

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barfuss W, Donges JF, Lade SJ, Kurths J (2018) When optimization for governing human-environment tipping elements is neither sustainable nor safe. Nature communications 9(1):1–10

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bevan A, Colledge S, Fuller D, Fyfe R, Shennan S, Stevens C (2017) Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:E10524–E10531

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bird D, Freeman J, Robinson E, Maughan G, Finley JB, Lambert PM, Kelly RL (2020) A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records. The Holocene 30:1345–1359

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bruno MC (2014) Beyond raised fields: Exploring farming practices and processes of agricultural change in the ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. American Anthropologist 116(1):130–145

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • CARD (2017) CARD 2.0. http://www.canadianarchaeologyca/. Accessed May 2018 

  • Carpenter SR, Brock WA, Folke C, van Nes EH, Scheffer M (2015) Allowing variance may enlarge the safe operating space for exploited ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(46):14384–14389

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coltrain JB, Leavitt SW (2002) Climate and diet in Fremont prehistory: economic variability and abandonment of maize agriculture in the Great Salt Lake Basin. American Antiquity 67(3):453–485

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crema ER, Habu J, Kobayashi K, Madella M (2016) Summed probability distribution of 14 C dates suggests regional divergences in the population dynamics of the Jomon Period in Eastern Japan. PloS one 11(4):e0154809

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crema ER, Bevan A (2021) Inference from large sets of radiocarbon dates: software and methods. Radiocarbon 63(1):23–39 https://www.cran.r-project.org/package=rcarbon

  • Dietz T, Rosa EA (1997) Effects of population and affluence on CO2 emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94(1):175–179

  • Dietz T, Ostrom E, Stern P (2003) The struggle to govern the commons. Science 302(5652):1907–1912, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ehrlich PR, Holdren JP (1971) Impact of population growth. Science 171:1212–1217

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Erickson CL (1999) Neo-environmental determinism and agrarian “collapse” in andean prehistory. Antiquity 73(281):634

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Erickson EL (2000) The lake Titicaca Basin: a Precolumbian built landscape. In: Lentz D (ed) Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas, Columbia University Press, New York, pp 311–356

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fordham DA, Saltré F, Haythorne S, Wigley TM, Otto-Bliesner BL, Chan KC, Brook BW (2017) PaleoView: a tool for generating continuous climate projections spanning the last 21,000 years at regional and global scales. Ecography 40(11):1348–1358

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman J, Anderies JM (2012) Intensification, tipping points and social change in a coupled forager-natural resource system. Human Nature 23:419–446

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman J, Peeples M, Anderies JM (2015) Toward a non-linear theory of the transition from foraging to farming. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40:109–122

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman J, Baggio JA, Robinson E, Byers DA, Gayo E, Finley JB, Meyer JA, Kelly RL, Anderies JM (2018a) Synchronization of energy consumption by human societies throughout the Holocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:9962–9967

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman J, Byers DA, Robinson E, Kelly RL (2018b) Culture process and the interpretation of radiocarbon data. Radiocarbon 60(2):453–467

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman J, Anderies JM, Mauldin RP, Hard RJ (2019) Should I stay or should I go? the emergence of partitioned land use among human foragers. PloS one 14(7):e0218440

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gayo EM, Latorre C, Santoro CM (2015) Timing of occupation and regional settlement patterns revealed by time-series analyses of an archaeological radiocarbon database for the South-Central Andes (16–25 s). Quaternary International 356:4–14

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gil AF, Giardina MA, Neme GA, Ugan A (2014) Demografía humana e incorporación de cultígenos en el centro occidente argentino: explorando tendencias en las fechas radiocarbónicas. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 44:523–553

    Google Scholar 

  • Gil AF, Menéndez LP, Atencio JP, Peralta EA, Neme GA, Ugan A (2017) Estrategias humanas, estabilidad y cambio en la frontera agrícola sur Americana. Latin American Antiquity pp 1–21

  • Halley JM (1996) Ecology, Evolution and 1–f noise. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 11:33–37

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hard RJ, Mauldin RP, Raymond GR (1996) Mano size, stable carbon isotope ratios, and macrobotanical remains as multiple lines of evidence of maize dependence in the american southwest. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 3(3):253–318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hastorf C (2008) Handbook of South American Archaeology. In: Silverman H, Isbell W (eds) The Formative Period in the Titicaca Basin, Springer, New York, pp. 545–561

    Google Scholar 

  • Hegmon M, Freeman J, Kintigh KW, Nelson MC, Oas S, Peeples MA, Torvinen A (2016) Marking and making differences: Representational diversity in the US Southwest. American Antiquity 81(2):253–272

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hegmon M, Peeples MA, collaboration LN (2018) The human experience of social transformation: Insights from comparative archaeology. PloS One 13(11):e0208060

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Herhahn CL, Hill JB (1998) Modeling agricultural production strategies in the northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico. Human Ecology 26(3):469–487

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Janetski JC (1997) Fremont hunting and resource intensification in the eastern Great Basin. Journal of Archaeological Science 24(12):1075–1088

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jørgensen EK, Pesonen P, Tallavaara M (2020) Climatic changes cause synchronous population dynamics and adaptive strategies among coastal hunter-gatherers in Holocene northern Europe. Quaternary Research 1–16

  • Keitt TH, Stanley HE (1998) Dynamics of North American breeding bird populations. Nature 393(6682):257–260

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lima M, Gayo E, Latorre C, Santoro C, Estay S, Cañellas-Boltà N, Margalef O, Giralt S, Sáez A, Pla-Rabes S, et al. (2020) Ecology of the collapse of Rapa Nui society. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287(1929):20200662

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu Z, Otto-Bliesner BL, He F, Brady EC, Tomas R, Clark PU, Carlson AE, Lynch-Stieflitz J, Curry W, Brook E, Erickson D, Jacob RL, Kutzbach J, Cheng J (2009) Transient simulation of last deglaciation with a new mechanism for Bolling-Allerod warming. Science 325(July):310–313

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu Z, Lu Z, Wen X, Otto-Bliesner BL, Timmermann A, Cobb KM (2014) Evolution and forcing mechanisms of El Niño over the past 21,000 years. Nature 515(7528):550–553

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Madsen DB, Simms SR (1998) The Fremont complex: a behavioral perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 12(3):255–336

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marquet PA, Quiñones RA, Abades S, Labra F, Tognelli M, Arim M, Rivandeneira M (2005) Scaling and power-laws in ecological systems. Journal of Experimental Biology 208(9):1749–1769

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Metcalfe D, Larrabee LV (1985) Fremont irrigation: evidence from Gooseberry Valley, central Utah. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 7(2):244–254

    Google Scholar 

  • Nelson M, Kintigh K, Abbott D, Anderies J (2010) The cross-scale interplay between social and biophysical context and the vulnerability of irrigation-dependent societies: archaeology’s long-term perspective. Ecology and Society 15(3)

  • Nelson MC, Ingram SE, Dugmore AJ, Streeter R, Peeples MA, McGovern TH, Hegmon M, Arneborg J, Kintigh KW, Brewington S, et al. (2016) Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(2):298–303

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Noy-Meir I (1975) Stability of grazing systems: an application of predator-prey graphs. The Journal of Ecology pp 459–481

  • Núñez L, Santoro CM (2011) El tránsito arcaico-formativo en la circumpuna y valles occidentales del centro sur andino: hacia los cambios neolíticos. Chungara Revista De Antropologia Chilena 43(ESPECIAL):487–530

    Google Scholar 

  • Oliver T, Roy DB, Hill JK, Brereton T, Thomas CD (2010) Heterogeneous landscapes promote population stability. Ecology letters 13(4):473–484

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oro D (2020) Perturbation, behavioural feedbacks, and population dynamics in social animals: when to leave and where to go. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Oro D, Genovart M, Tavecchia G, Fowler MS, Martínez-Abraín A (2013) Ecological and evolutionary implications of food subsidies from humans. Ecology Letters 16(12):1501–1514

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ortloff CR, Kolata AL (1993) Climate and collapse: agro-ecological perspectives on the decline of the Tiwanaku state. Journal of Archaeological Science 20(2):195–221

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Otto-Bliesner BL, Russell JM, Clark PU, Liu Z, Overpeck JT, Konecky B, DeMenocal P, Nicholson SE, He F, Lu Z (2014) Coherent changes of southeastern equatorial and northern African rainfall during the last deglaciation. Science 346(6214):1223–1228

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Palmisano A, Woodbridge J, Roberts CN, Bevan A, Fyfe R, Shennan S, Cheddadi R, Greenberg R, Kaniewski D, Langgut D, Leroy SA, Litt T, Miebach A (2019) Holocene landscape dynamics and long-term population trends in the Levant. The Holocene 29(5):708–727

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peregrine P (2018) Toward a theory of recurrent social formations. In: Sabloff JA, Sabloff PLW (eds) The Emergence of Premodern States: New Perspectives on the Development of Complex Societies, vol 2, SFI Press

  • Peros MC, Munoz SE, Gajewski K, Viau AE (2010) Prehistoric demography of North America inferred from radiocarbon data. Journal of Archaeological Science 37(3):656–664

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rall BC, Vucic-Pestic O, Ehnes RB, Emmerson M, Brose U (2010) Temperature, predator-prey interaction strength and population stability. Global Change Biology 16:2145–2157

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rick JW (1987) Dates as data: An examination of the Peruvian Preceramic radiocarbon record. American Antiquity 52:55–73

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Robinson E, Nicholson C, Kelly RL (2019) The importance of spatial data to open-access national archaeological databases and the development of paleodemography research. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7(4):395–408

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sandor JA, Gersper PL, Hawley JW (1990) Prehistoric agricultural terraces and soils in the Mimbres area, New Mexico. World Archaeology 22(1):70–86

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Santana-Sagredo F, Schulting RJ, Méndez-Quiros P, Vidal-Elgueta A, Uribe M, Loyola R, Maturana-Fernández A, Díaz FP, Latorre C, McRostie VB, Santoro CM, Mandakovic V, Harrod C, Lee-Thorp J (2021) White gold guano fertilizer drove agricultural intensification in the Atacama Desert from ad 1000. Nature Plants 7(2):152–158

  • Santoro CM, Capriles JM, Gayo EM, de Porras ME, Maldonado A, Standen VG, Latorre C, Castro V, Angelo D, McRostie, Uribe M, Valenzuela D, Ugalde P, Marquet P (2017) Continuities and discontinuities in the socio-environmental systems of the Atacama Desert during the last 13,000 years. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 46:28–39

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scarborough VL, Fladd SG, Dunning NP, Plog S, Owen LA, Carr C, Tankersley KB, McCool JP, Watson AS, Haussner EA, et al. (2018) Water uncertainty, ritual predictability and agricultural canals at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. antiquity 92(364):870–889

    Google Scholar 

  • Schollmeyer KG (2009) Resource stress and settlement pattern change in the eastern Mimbres area, southwest New Mexico. Arizona State University

    Google Scholar 

  • Shennan S (2013) Demographic continuities and discontinuities in Neolithic Europe: evidence, methods and implications. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20(2):300–311

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shennan S, Downey SS, Timpson A, Edinborough K, Colledge S, Kerig T, Manning K, Thomas MG (2013) Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe. Nature Communications 4:1–8

  • Simms SR (2009) Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Routledge

    Google Scholar 

  • Stanish C (2003) Ancient Titicaca: The evolution of complex society in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. Univ of California Press, Berkeley, CA

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Surovell TA, Byrd Finley J, Smith GM, Brantingham PJ, Kelly R (2009) Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(8):1715–1724

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Timpson A, Colledge S, Crema E, Edinborough K, Kerig T, Manning K, Thomas MG, Shennan S (2014) Reconstructing regional population fluctuations in the European Neolithic using radiocarbon dates: a new case-study using an improved method. Journal of Archaeological Science 52:549–557

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turchin P, Currie TE, Whitehouse H, Francois P, Feeney K, Mullins D, Hoyer D, Collins C, Grohmann S, Savage P, Mendel-Gleason G, Turner E, Dupeyron A, Cioni E, Reddish J, Levine J, Jordan G, Brandl E, Williams A, Cesaretti R, Krueger M, Ceccarelli A, Figliulo-Rosswurm J, Tuan PJ, Peregrine P, Marciniak A, Preiser-Kapeller J, Kradin N, Korotayev A, Palmisano A, Baker D, Bidmead J, Bol P, Christian D, Cook C, Covey A, Feinman G, Júlíusson AD, Kristinsson A, Miksic J, Mostern R, Petrie C, Rudiak-Gould P, ter Haar B, Wallace V, Mair V, Xie L, Baines J, Bridges E, Manning J, Lockhart B, Bogaard A, Spencer C (2018) Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(2):E144–E151, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708800115, URL http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708800115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Williams N Alan (2012) The use of summed radiocarbon probability distributions in archaeology: a review of methods. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(3):578 – 589

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zahid HJ, Robinson E, Kelly RL (2016) Agriculture, population growth, and statistical analysis of the radiocarbon record. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(4):931–935

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ziólkowski MS, Krzanowski A, Misczynski A (1994) Andes: radiocarbon database for Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Andean Archaeological Mission of the Institute of Archaeology, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland

Download references

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).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacob Freeman.

Ethics declarations

Informed Consent

Informed consent was not required for this project.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The original online version of this article was revised: The Supplementary Material was incorrect.

Supplementary Information

ESM 1

(PDF 2002 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00242-z

Keywords

Navigation