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Charles L. Redman
Just as geography may have acted as a positive attractor to settlements and,
later, put the settlements at risk, so did social institutions develop that were
designed to take advantage of the situation but eventually created a rigidity
that stifled adaptive responses. Many of the authors report on situations that
reflected this phenomenon. Andrew Dugmore and Orri Vésteinsson relate that
the long-distance administration that had contributed to the establishment
and periodic success of Icelandic society was also unresponsive to environmental
changes and inhibited necessary restructuring of adaptations. Similarly, in
Mesopotamia, hierarchically distant administrators had little awareness of or
concern for the changing local conditions that undermined agricultural productivity.
Both Sheets for Central America and Nelson and colleagues for the
Southwest identified key cross-scale interactions in which the environmental
changes gradually undermined the adaptive capabilities of the central government,
stifling change and making it less able to cope with subsequent shocks.
Sheets and Cooper reflect the range of the chapter authors’ ideas by suggesting
in their introduction six “tools” prehistoric (and perhaps contemporary)
societies used to cope with sudden environmental change: settlement
location, household architecture, food procurement strategies, reciprocal
social networks, education, and disaster management planning. I would like
to generalize this one level further and consider these and other strategies as
examples of four basic problem-solving strategies people have used to cope
with all sorts of challenges they have faced. The four domains of adaptive strategies
socie ties have employed throughout time can be summarized as follows
(Redman 1999):
1. Locational flexibility and mobility
2. Ecosystem management
3. Built environment and other technologies
4. Social complexification
What makes many of the strategies in all of these domains so challenging to
either endorse or condemn is that each of them appears to have emerged because
it had very positive results for the communities involved. Yet many of the strategies
introduced new vulnerabilities that, over time, may have undermined
those same communities. For example, locational flexibility and mobility as a
key element of a settlement system dominated much of early human prehistory.
However, the advantages of sedentism in terms of investing in more substantial
facilities and productive infrastructure led increasing numbers of communities
to adopt a more place-restricted settlement pattern. Similarly, with ecosystem
management, many immediate advantages would accrue by practicing deforestation
to open landscapes for cereal production, introducing non-native species
for food production, and redirecting local hydrology for irrigating fields.
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