Societies marked by administrative hierarchies, rulers, and high degrees of integration developed in multiple locations around the world beginning 8,000 years ago. The process was episodic and marked by frequent economic failure and political disintegration, in some instances in the context of abrupt climate change. This interdisciplinary research project will develop a human-landscape-climate model for the emergence and resilience of complex socioeconomic systems and will apply and test the predictions of the model with extant data and findings from new research in the tropical Maya lowlands of southern Belize. The project's primary goal is to model human behavioral responses to environmental transformation, whether abrupt or gradual, by linking together processes of settlement, resource exploitation, agricultural intensification, competition, and polity stability. The project aims to develop a general theoretical model that integrates population density and distribution, environmental suitability as a function of economic intensification and endogenous environmental change, and political exploitation. A secondary goal is to test this model at Uxbenka, a Maya polity that formed in southern Belize between from 4,000 to 1,500 years before the present (BP). Archaeological work in the region suggests that integrated, spatially extensive societies formed in the context of demographic expansion, agricultural intensification, environmental degradation, and eventual fragmentation. The available paleoclimatic data indicate that an abrupt decrease in rainfall played a role in the disintegration of certain polities from 2,100 BP to 1,800 BP. This episode was followed by the reintegration and proliferation of yet more complex societies after 1800 BP. Many of these collapsed completely at 1000 BP, again within the context of abrupt climate change. Extant data from a century of research in this region, complemented by new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and ethnographic investigation in southern Belize will guide the construction and appraisal of models meant to capture the causes of these events.
Climate change in the context of human-induced environmental degradation is an acute problem facing the increasingly interdependent global community of nearly six billion people. It presents difficult policy issues of great importance for contemporary societies. Climatic variability on multiple timescales can elicit a range of human responses that depend on the distribution and density of human populations, their modes of production, effects on environment, forms of political integration, and control via coercion or ideological manipulation by administrative hierarchies. General models capable of incorporating these complex interactions are essential for exploring the stability and vulnerability of complex socioeconomic systems. Southern Belize provides a well-researched environmental and cultural context for the interdisciplinary, empirical studies necessary to build and test such models and to appraise effective and ineffective responses. Along with academic and popular publications, the research team will develop education modules for primary and secondary schools in the U.S and Belize, provide teacher workshops and community outreach for sustainable development, and offer project-based interdisciplinary experiences for university students in the U.S. and Belize. Project data, analyses and models will be made available through an on-line archive. An award resulting from the FY 2008 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.
Climate change in the context of human-induced environmental degradation is an ever-growing problem confronting our increasingly inter-dependent global community of over seven billion. Current evidence indicates that the societal impacts of rapid climate change can be severe and unpredictable, as they are coupled with human decision making which affects political stability, economic interactions, food production, human suffering, and ultimately human demography. The primary goal of this interdisciplinary project was to create models of dynamic human behavioral responses to environmental transformation (abrupt or gradual, natural or anthropogenic) and to link these processes to settlement patterns, resource exploitation, agricultural intensification, competition, polity stability, and demographic transitions. These models were developed using a wide range of archival data related to climate variability, environmental change, political growth and decline, conflict and warfare, agricultural productivity, and population change. The model parameters were tested using empirical data from archaeological, paleoecological, and paleoclimate field and laboratory studies of ancient Maya civilization centered at the Classic Period (ca. AD 100-900) polity Uxbenka, located in southern Belize. Collaborative research projects included developing a 2,000 year annually resolved rainfall and temperature reconstruction based on cave deposits, a 3,200 history of regional burning and plant communities based on sediment cores from local lagoons, a high precision chronology of the growth and decline of Uxbenka, and the development of Geographic Information Databases (GIS) mapping the growth and decline of the polity and changes to the regional landscape. Results from the empirical study suggest a strong correlation between population growth, agricultural intensification, and the rise of social inequality commensurate with increases in political complexity and abundant rainfall. These same developments also correspond with increases in land clearing and burning, likely for agriculture and economic exploitation as demand increased. Regional decline corresponds with a gradual reduction in rainfall, culminating with the apparent abandonment of numerous regional political centers at the time of a series of severe droughts. The collaborative project also engaged in significant outreach and educational activities in the modern Mopan Maya village of Santa Cruz, including educational programs for children and adults and the development of a multilingual grade school curriculum in environmental and cultural heritage.
