Nonlinear landscape and cultural response to sea-level rise

Barnett, Robert L., Charman, Dan J., Johns, Charles, Ward, Sophie L., Bevan, Andrew, Bradley, Sarah L., Camidge, Kevin, Fyfe, Ralph M., Gehrels, W. Roland, Gehrels, Maria J., Hatton, Jackie, Khan, Nicole S., Marshall, Peter, Maezumi, S. Yoshi, Mills, Steve ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5748-0613, Mulville, Jacqui ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9392-3693, Perez, Marta, Roberts, Helen M., Scourse, James D., Shepherd, Francis and Stevens, Todd 2020. Nonlinear landscape and cultural response to sea-level rise. Science Advances 6 (45) , eabb6376. 10.1126/sciadv.abb6376

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

Abstract

Rising sea levels have been associated with human migration and behavioral shifts throughout prehistory, often with an emphasis on landscape submergence and consequent societal collapse. However, the assumption that future sea-level rise will drive similar adaptive responses is overly simplistic. While the change from land to sea represents a dramatic and permanent shift for preexisting human populations, the process of change is driven by a complex set of physical and cultural processes with long transitional phases of landscape and socioeconomic change. Here, we use reconstructions of prehistoric sea-level rise, paleogeographies, terrestrial landscape change, and human population dynamics to show how the gradual inundation of an island archipelago resulted in decidedly nonlinear landscape and cultural responses to rising sea levels. Interpretation of past and future responses to sea-level change requires a better understanding of local physical and societal contexts to assess plausible human response patterns in the future.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Additional Information:	Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
Publisher:	American Association for the Advancement of Science
ISSN:	2375-2548
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 March 2021
Date of Acceptance:	9 September 2020
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 01:24
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/139796

Citation Data

Cited 6 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item