Recovery & resilience of prehistoric societies after extreme events as viewed through palaeodemography

The time taken by human societies to recover after extreme events is of widespread interest to archaeologists and anthropologists. To date, there has been no consistent, comparative study across prehistoric cultures to determine rates of recovery, their spatiotemporal variability, and the factors that affect outcomes. This talk will present a meta-analysis of palaeodemographic records that use archaeological radiocarbon dates as a proxy for prehistoric population history. It will initially draw on well-known case studies, with a view towards quantifying the geographical/biotic/cultural influences on societal recovery in the face of extreme events, as well as how different types of events may shape adaptive responses. In summary, the paper aims to advocate for rigorous and robust approaches towards past patterns of resilience, ideally ones that 1) focus on measurable, comparable properties of cultural dynamics, and 2) are linked more closely with interdisciplinary definitions of resilience, in order to enable large-scale syntheses of archaeological and anthropological data to inform future action.