“The more often a population experiences shocks or declines, the more likely it is to be able to recover more quickly the next time,” says Philip Riris, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
He and his colleagues found that this trade-off between vulnerability and resilience was particularly pronounced among early farmers and herders. Agricultural societies have experienced more declines throughout history than other societies—for example, hunter-gatherer groups—but they have also recovered more quickly from these declines than other groups.
“This is an important study,” says Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor at Georgetown University in the US who studies how climate change has affected human history, but was not involved in the study. “There’s a lot of really influential work on the failure of societies in the face of climate change, but the focus on resilience, and resilience alone, is far less common.”
Historians and archaeologists have published numerous individual case studies of societal crises, agrees P. Riris. However, it is difficult to compare these experiences across time and space. The scientist and his team collected data from 16 separate archaeological sites around the world, from South Africa to Canada, and the data spans as much as 30,000 years.
To map the declines and recoveries, the researchers used a method called “dates as data.” At each site, radiocarbon dating, which determines the age of organic matter based on the decay of radioactive carbon-14, was recorded. Previous studies have found that the number of carbon-14 dates at a given time and place is related to population. When there are more people, there are more activities, buildings, trash piles, and hearths that can be excavated and dated.
Most of the declines examined in the study took place over more than a decade and were caused by a variety of causes, from environmental changes to societal upheavals. In some cases, the researchers had specific historical or climatological information about what those crises were like—for example, the frost that hit Norway and destroyed crops. Mr Riris says farmers and herders could have been more vulnerable to disaster, as one bad season or drought could mean outright starvation. However, agricultural and pastoral societies may also have been well equipped to recover from disaster.
“To the winners [po sukrėtimo] either they’re just lucky, or they have some technology, practice, behavior or social institution that means they’ve done better during the crisis, says Riris. “This makes it more likely that they will pass on that learning, that aspect of culture, that will allow their offspring to behave better later on.”
Archaeological findings are in perfect harmony with historical research, says D. Degroot, who studied the resilience of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. under the conditions of the Little Ice Age. “I found those things in a very narrow case study, and here the authors find them in a much broader set of case studies.”
The researcher also notes that it is not so clear whether modern people can directly use these lessons. All the societies in the study were pre-industrial and may have little in common with the current world order. Still, Mr. Riris says, the ability to compare societies and look for patterns is important.
“It provides a common framework that will allow us to systematically address resilience issues,” he says.
