free download - University Press of Colorado

Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 8
Long-Term Vulnerability and Resilience: Three
Examples from Archaeological Study in the
Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico
Margaret C. Nelson, Michelle Hegmon, Keith W. Kintigh, Ann P. Kinzig,
Ben A. Nelson, John M. Anderies, David A. Abbott, Katherine A. Spielmann,
Scott E. Ingram, Matthew A. Peeples, Stephanie Kulow, Colleen A. Strawhacker,
and Cathryn Meegan
Arizona State University
Grand Canyon College
Archaeology brings time depth to an array of issues, from migration and resettlement
to climate change and environmental impacts of human actions. The
long term does not provide predictions for future courses but it does provide
examples, social-ecological experiments of sorts, by which we can come to better
understand processes and relationships used to make contemporary decisions
about managing for change versus managing for stability. In this chapter
we describe a collaborative study of long-term relationships between ecosystems
and social systems in the prehispanic and proto-historic southwestern
United States and northern Mexico that examines key concepts employed by
scholars and policy makers in the resilience community. This community’s
concern is with promotion of social and environmental policies that build
resilient systems that can flexibly respond to uncertain future conditions and
avoid catastrophic transformations. In this chapter we focus on three key concepts:
rigidity, diversity, and tradeoffs.
Chapter 9
Social Evolution, Hazards, and Resilience:
Some Concluding Thoughts
Timothy A. Kohler
Washington State University
I briefly consider the history of social evolutionary models in anthropology
and, even more briefly, in biology. I discuss the implications of the chapters in
this book for these models, which as a group imply that such models must consider
the types of risks and hazards a society faces, as well as the temporal and
spatial structures of those risks. I outline what such a model would look like.
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