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.
