Battarbee R.W., Binney H.A. (Eds.) Natural Climate Variability and Global Warming: A Holocene Perspective

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Frank Oldﬁeld

Me-Bar and Valdez (2005) infer an 80 percent increase in vulnerability during the

9th century ad (the period of cultural demise) compared with the level of vulner-

ability during the late pre-Classical period some 600 years earlier.

For the Anasazi culture, severe drought may have been the “last straw” but ear-

lier there were severe droughts that the Anasazi survived. There is also evidence of

evacuation of sites before drought set in. The demise of the Anasazi is now believed

to have also involved other factors such as overexploitation of local resources,

overextended trade routes, internecine strife, religious/ideological conﬂict, and the

possible pull of Kachina-based religion to the south in the areas now occupied by

the related Hopi and Zuni peoples (see e.g. Kohler 1988, 1992; van West 1991).

There have been several attempts to deepen understanding of the processes

involved through model-based simulations that are of wider interest for their

methodological implications. In Dean et al.’s (1999) study, households act as the

agent units. The authors conclude that this approach allows some testing of

hypotheses (or at least their reinforcement or negation in light of the degree of

compatibility with the available empirical evidence), sheds light on the importance

of interaction between social and environmental factors, identiﬁes examples of

equiﬁnality, permits experimental manipulation of behavioral modes and their

effects on responses to environmental variability, and makes it possible to explore

previously ignored, unspeciﬁed or discounted factors. They claim only partial

success in relation to their main goal, to generate target outcomes consistent with

the archaeological evidence and identify rules of agent behavior that generate

these. Axtell et al. (2002) claim to have come closer to achieving this goal.

There is drama in the collapse of past civilizations, for the remains – the cliff

dwellings of Mesa Verde, or the great temples of the Mayan or Khmer cultures –

are evocative and their desertion is inexplicable without much research. In so far as

generalizations are possible, the key to their understanding lies in unraveling the

complex relationships between environmental change and human cultures. Some

poorly adaptive behaviors recur in many of the case studies now available – the

evolution of exploitative hierarchies out of touch with the cultural and environ-

mental consequences of their roles in society and demands of the rest of society,

overexploitation of a limited resource base in response to population growth, envir-

onmental damage resulting from this, short-term responses to shortage without

regard to long-term consequences, and failure to incorporate memory of previous

periods of environmental stress into the repertoire of survival strategies employed.

Couple a combination of these behavior types to the stresses imposed by severe

drought especially, and collapse has often been the result. Climatic factors have

not been implicated in every case, but there are relatively few in which they can be

ruled out.

Fascinating though the consideration of past collapse is, there is surely an urgent

need to balance these studies with ones devoting at least as much attention to

documenting successful survival strategies during periods of climatically imposed

stress, as well as to learning more from situations where irreversible damage to the

resource base of a society has been avoided and long-term productivity maintained

(see e.g. Crumley 2000).

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The role of people in the Holocene

A role for Holocene paleoresearch

We turn now to an examination of the role paleoresearch may play in addressing

the issues raised in the foregoing sections. The ﬁrst four themes above hinge, in

large part, on the reconstruction of changes in the structure, function, and extent of

past ecosystems, of the disturbance regimes to which they have been subjected, and,

in the case of the third theme, of the hydrologic and erosional responses to such

changes. It is my belief that, amongst other things, addressing these issues calls for a

shift in emphasis from using paleobiological techniques, such as pollen or macro-

fossil analysis, primarily for climate reconstruction towards using them primarily

as the basis for ecological reconstruction. This would allow other evidence for

past climate change (chironomids, tree rings, and stable isotopes, for example) to

generate trajectories of variability independent of the evidence for ecosystem

changes. This is a prerequisite of any attempt to disentangle evidence for climate

change from that portraying ecosystem responses (see also Birks, this volume). It is

also essential if we are to deepen our understanding of past human impacts on

ecosystems. This requires further efforts to characterize and detect the imprint

of human activities in the results of paleobiological research, and to link such

evidence to the archaeological record.

These are also the important components of any contribution paleoscientists

may make to the unraveling of problems posed by the ﬁfth theme, in view of the

frequency with which ecological degradation has been invoked as a contributory

factor in societal collapse. In addition though, there is a need for a much higher

degree of interdisciplinarity, spanning the biophysical and social sciences.

Achieving better empirically based quantiﬁcation of feedbacks from land-cover

change both to climate directly and via the impact on atmospheric greenhouse gas

concentrations depends, in the ﬁrst instance, on developing a more robust frame-

work for inferring past land-cover and, in so far as possible, ecosystem structure

and function from palynological data. One step in the right direction is the attempt

to improve the basis for estimating landscape openness from pollen data (Gaillard

et al. 1998; Sugita et al. 1999; Broström et al. 2004). Nielsen and Odgaard (2005)

summarize a parallel approach comparing the degree of success achieved by

different approaches to quantitative, pollen-based vegetation reconstruction by

comparing the results for ad 1800 with cartographic evidence from the period.

They claim that their Extended R-value (ERV) model captures the main trends

in vegetation and land-cover, and also allows extrapolation, incorporates back-

ground pollen explicitly, and may be more applicable to large lakes than an alterna-

tive partial least-squares regression approach. There is an urgent need to extend

the application of pollen-based land-cover reconstructions on a much wider

spatial scale than achieved hitherto and this is currently part of the agenda of the

POLLANDCAL initiative using the Europe Pollen Data Base (Gaillard, personal

commmunication). A further step must be the application of similar approaches

to other regions, especially in areas of long-standing human impact in Eurasia.

Given the pivotal role of ﬁre in the regeneration and disturbance histories of many

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Frank Oldﬁeld

ecosystems, there is also a need to integrate more reconstructions of land-cover

changes with reconstructions of ﬁre incidence. There is also a continued need for

improved chronologies to establish the phasing and precise links between changes

in biophysical and social systems. More studies need to go beyond the demonstra-

tion of compelling coincidences between extreme climatic events and cultural

changes.

One of the crucial issues concerns the role of modeling in these areas of paleo-

research. In some cases, the possible roles for modeling are relatively easy to deﬁne.

Given sufﬁciently robust reconstructions of changes in past ecosystem structure

and function, the estimation of consequences for climate and for atmospheric

greenhouse gas concentrations using models derived from present-day observa-

tions of the relevant processes becomes a logical next step. Indeed, there are

already examples of this type of linkage, but the empirical basis for inferring

changes through time in past vegetation and land-cover is still relatively weak. The

potential value of studies at the interface between pollen-based reconstructions of

land-cover and models of vegetation–atmosphere interactions works in two direc-

tions. Good quality empirical reconstructions of both vegetation and regional

climate could be used to test the likely reliability of models designed to explore

the future impact of land-cover change on projected future climate. Equally, well-

constrained models of the role of past land-cover change in driving regional climate

change could be of great value in establishing the role of anthropogenic land-cover

transformation in past desertiﬁcation.

Given the susceptibility of human societies to changes governed by indetermin-

acy, what, realistically, is the role of modeling in the area of human–environment

interactions described above? Several authors use agent-based modeling tech-

niques, which are, to some degree, common to the methodologies of modelers

studying past societies and those using integrated impact assessment to develop

scenarios of future human–environment relationships (e.g Holman et al. 2005;

Matthews 2005). Holman et al.’s approach (Figure 3.12) rests in part on the

Drivers (climate and

socio-economic change)

Pressures (environmental

and economic)

Impacts on coasts, land,

water and biodiversity

Responses (policy

or autonomous)

Environmental

state changes

Figure 3.12 The “Drivers–Pressure–State–Impact–Response”

(DPSIR) conceptual framework used by Holman et al. (2005)

in developing future regional integrated impact assessments

for the UK, but equally applicable as a framework within

which to study past interactions between societies and

changing environmental pressures. (From Holman et al.

(2005) with kind permission from Springer Science and

Business Media.)

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The role of people in the Holocene

identiﬁcation of “sensitivity of impacts and interactions using historical analogs,

e.g. previous droughts, changes in crop subsidies, increases in housing stock”.

Matthews’ article is a future-oriented study using multi-agent modeling applied to

simulated subsistence systems. One important criterion for successful models that

seek to link biogeophysical and cultural processes is the capacity to incorporate

adaptive learning in the model as simulations evolve through time. One possible

approach uses cellular automaton-type models (Dearing et al. 2006). Wirtz and

Lemmen (2003) apply, with impressive success, a rule-based multi-agent model

with adaptive capacity to simulate the spread of Neolithic agriculture. If we take

the view that human–environment systems are special cases of self-organizing and

emergent systems, there may be potentially applicable models developed within

ecology (e.g. Breckling et al. 2005).

Conclusions

In many parts of the world, especially those long settled by societies with agricul-

tural or urban components, an evaluation of present-day ecosystems and future

sustainability should recognize the importance of past human activities and the

roles they have played in creating and modifying the environmental systems upon

which sustainability depends.

Many of the environmental impacts of past human activities are mediated

through changes in land-use/cover. These impacts include feedbacks into the

climate system, both directly and via changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas con-

centrations. Land-cover changes arising from human exploitation are also often

implicated in changes in hydrologic and erosional regimes: they alter the canvas

upon which the interplay between climatic and hydrologic variability is expressed.

They are also central to the creation, maintenance or destruction of habitats upon

which biodiversity depends.

Many past human societies have been strongly affected by climate change and it

is unrealistic to explore the long-term fate of past cultures and civilizations without

acknowledging this. That said, acknowledging the role played by climate change

should not lead to interpretations of cultural expansion or demise in terms of a

simple causative link between climate and the fate of societies. The nature of social

organization, its ﬂexibility, and adaptive capacity are critical in determining the

success or otherwise of human responses to any external stresses.

From the above, it would seem important to use the record of past human–

environment interactions, in all its complexity, as part of the basis for planning a

sustainable future in the face of projected climate change, with all its daunting

implications. For as long as a methodological divide exists between researchers

dealing with contemporary and future change and paleoscientists concerned

with longer time perspectives, the desired synergy between the two types of study

will never be fully realized. The divide springs in part from training and the con-

sequent differences in the methodological repertoire acquired, and in part from

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Frank Oldﬁeld

the extent to which much of paleoscience is seen as “history” rather than part of a

temporal continuum. The climate community has succeeded in bridging the gap

between paleoresearch and future projections by viewing reconstructions of past

climatic variability as insights into the nature of processes, rather than simply as

retrospective snapshots of “history”. From this springs recognition of the value of

reconstructions of past variability and change on a wide range of time-scales. Let

this serve as a model for the wider research community that embraces human as

well as biophysical aspects of environmental change.

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Sandra Mather and Suzanne Yee for all their help in pre-

paring the ﬁgures, also John Dearing, Richard Bradshaw, and Gina Hannon for

fruitful discussions. Yiyin Li and Liping Zhou provided indispensable help with

Chinese evidence for Holocene land-cover change. Björn Berglund and Arlene

Rosen provided helpful guidance in their reviews of the chapter.

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