uwyo.edu
PAGES' PEOPLE 3000 working group will hold a workshop, titled "Human Paleo-biogeography and the Synchrony of Social-Ecological Systems on Earth" from 20-24 May 2019 in Vernal, Utah, USA.
Venue
Dinosaur National Monument, Vernal, Utah, USA.
Logistics
The number of participants will be limited to approximately 20-25 people.
Description
The PEOPLE 3000 working group focuses on integrating archaeological and paleoecological case studies with mathematical modeling. We seek to understand how co-evolving human societies and ecosystems can successfully cope with the interrelated forces of population growth, increasing social complexity and climate change, and why some societies subsequently collapse/reorganize.
This workshop builds on from work done at two previous PAGES-funded workshops: the first (held in Logan, Utah, USA, in 2016) was titled "The Coevolution of Climate, Population, and Food Systems in North and South America" and the second (held in Los Reyunos, Argentina, in May 2018) was titled "Social Complexity and Climate Change, and Why Societies Fail to Cope with these Interrelated Forces and Collapse/Reorganize".
Workshop aims
This third workshop will serve four aims in our working group:
1. Expand our network to include case studies beyond North and South America, such as Northern Africa, East Asia, and Europe. This will enable us to expand the application of the theoretical and methodological deliverables we have developed in this project to other social and ecological contexts.
2. Facilitate the incorporation of more ECRs into the working group, with skill sets that greatly enhance the working group.
3. Enable further work to build multiple archaeological and paleoclimatological proxy datasets in our original case study regions in North and South America.
4. Build on synergies between PEOPLE 3000 and the LandUse6k portion of LandCover6k that were initiated at the LandCover6k workshop in Sitges, Spain, in 2018.
The focus of this workshop is based on two recent outputs from PEOPLE 3000. The first is a paper in PNAS titled "Synchronization of Energy Consumption by Human Societies throughout the Holocene". The second is currently in review with Nature Communications, and is titled "The Optimal Species Richness Environments for Human Populations". These papers highlight how our working group is producing deliverables to develop a new long-term and interdisciplinary perspective on human paleo-biogeography throughout the world by our development of new theory and method for dealing with archaeological and paleoecological datasets.
Workshop White Paper
Access the Overleaf link to see the initial workshop White Paper: https://www.overleaf.com/read/rdwjvmkmmphg
This document will help get the group organized. It is imperative to read the paper before attending the workshop. The paper begins to outline overarching goals and contains a draft workshop schedule. In addition, you will find requests for preparation in bold.
In the upper left hand corner of the Overleaf window, you will see a series of folders. The ClimateSmartFoodSystems and ParticipantPapers folders contain papers from our various case studies and on climate smart food systems. Please have a look through these papers. You should be able to download them directly from Overleaf. Just click on the paper in the folder sidebar to the left, then click on the big blue download button when the paper previews on your main screen.
Outreach event
An open outreach event will be held on Thursday 23 May from 16:00-19:00 at the Uintah County Heritage Museum in Vernal.
How societies build resilience into food-producing systems is a major challenge as we face unprecedented problems of increasing population and an uncertain climate future. Archaeology provides critical insight to this problem, and because Uintah Basin farmers, past and present, exist at the environmental margins of agriculture we can learn important lessons from strategies that succeed and fail. We bring archaeologists and paleoecologists from around the world who examine this problem in their own local context together with local stakeholders to share perspectives on how we develop climate-smart food systems as we move into the future.
Registration
All are welcome to attend. To register for the workshop, please contact Judson Finley by 1 May: judson.finley@usu.edu.
Financial support
PAGES has provided some funding for the attendance of early-career researchers and scientists from developing countries. To apply for funding, please contact Erick Robinson: erick.robinson@uwyo.edu and Judson Finley: judson.finley@usu.ed with a 400-word abstract of your research and list of datasets you would like to contribute.
Further information
Contact the meeting organizer Erick Robinson: Erick.Robinson@uwyo.edu
Workshop website: http://anthropology.usu.edu/projects/coevolutioncpfs