Surviving Aridification: a Framework for Ancient Resilience (SAFAR)

The project

The SAFAR project aims to develop a quantitative framework to understand the resilience of past communities impacted by a shift to drier climatic conditions (i.e., aridification). Due to the large number of potential factors, as well as their non-linear inter-relations, it is complicated to disentangle their individual contribution to a community’s resilience. In an attempt to comprehensively document these factors and assess their relevance for resilience to aridification in ancient contexts, the SAFAR project will develop a framework. This will be constructed based on an iterative process of development and continual improvement, with three key interconnected stages:

1. Framework Development: Utilising modern resilience literature, we will create an exhaustive list of socio-political, economic and environmental factors (see Fig. 1) that contribute to resilience to aridification and how they are measured in the modern context and thus may have contributed to resilience to aridification in the past. All of these characteristics will be mapped onto a conceptual framework, alongside their perceived importance in modern contexts and potential relationships with one-another.
2. Proxy Coding of Variables: Based on existing ancient climate-society literature, we will systematically cover each and every characteristic assembled in the above framework, and add any other potentially relevant factors discussed, suggesting ways in which they can be quantified using so-called “proxies” derived from the palaeo-evidence. A proxy is an indirect indicator of information from the past; for example, palaeoclimate data may reflect changes in precipitation but does not directly measure it. We will also assess the reliability of each proxy, based on how accurate of an indicator it is and what other influences it may have. This will result in the final product of the project, the SAFAR framework, constructed as a guide for turning palaeo-data into comparable resilience variables. This will also include the development of excel spreadsheets that use this data to automatically calculate these characteristics and a variety of related uncertainties and confidence measures. For example, the locations of settlements will be used to calculate Land Use Potentiality percentages and the geographical diversity of artefacts as a proxy for the size of trade networks. Having a framework constructed in this way enables a quantitative cross-comparison that accounts for the complexity of resilience and streamlines the study of additional case studies. The SAFAR framework can also be used to assess directions for future research in any case study, either by identifying missing evidence or shortfalls in the quality of evidence.
3. Case Studies: We will apply the SAFAR framework to five case studies to test and refine it: (1) Neolithic Ireland, (2) the Bronze Age Indus Valley, (3) the Bronze Age Peloponnese, (4) Antique Lower Mesopotamia, and (5) the Classic Yucatán Peninsula. These were selected due to a high density of datasets and their diversity – in terms of climatic and environmental conditions, as well as social and technological complexity. This will enable refinement of the framework without a bias towards a particular region or research culture. Importantly, once we have input all data for the case studies to the SAFAR framework, we will assess the most relevant set of factors for resilience to aridification in each example. This will provide new insight into these case studies and by comparing them we will reach new conclusions about the presence or absence of generalisable rules for resilience to aridification.

Publications

Jacobson, M.J. 2022. Archaeological evidence for community resilience and sustainability: a bibliometric assessment. Sustainability 14(24): 16591. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416591