ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Loss of resilience preceded transformations of pre-Hispanic Pueblo societies.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Assessing and comparing early warning signal performance in spatially-structured systems.PloS one · 2025Article
- Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE.Science advances · 2024Article
- The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
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- Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Contributions of evolutionary anthropology to understanding climate-induced human migration.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2021Review
- Critical Transitions in Ecosystems and Society. The Contribution of Sociological Systems Theory to the Analysis of Socio-Environmental Transformations.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Climate extremes are thought to have triggered large-scale transformations of various ancient societies, but they rarely seem to be the sole cause. It has been hypothesized that slow internal developments often made societies less resilient over time, setting them up for collapse. Here, we provide quantitative evidence for this idea. We use annual-resolution time series of building activity to demonstrate that repeated dramatic transformations of Pueblo cultures in the pre-Hispanic US Southwest were preceded by signals of critical slowing down, a dynamic hallmark of fragility. Declining stability of the status quo is consistent with archaeological evidence for increasing violence and in some cases, increasing wealth inequality toward the end of these periods. Our work thus supports the view that the cumulative impact of gradual processes may make societies more vulnerable through time, elevating the likelihood that a perturbation will trigger a large-scale transformation that includes radically rejecting the status quo and seeking alternative pathways.
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