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. 2021 Jan 18;376(1816):20190718.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0718. Epub 2020 Nov 30.

Dendrochronological dates confirm a Late Prehistoric population decline in the American Southwest derived from radiocarbon dates

Erick Robinson  1 , R Kyle Bocinsky  2 , Darcy Bird  3 , Jacob Freeman  1 , Robert L Kelly  4
Affiliations

Dendrochronological dates confirm a Late Prehistoric population decline in the American Southwest derived from radiocarbon dates

Erick Robinson et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

The northern American Southwest provides one of the most well-documented cases of human population growth and decline in the world. The geographic extent of this decline in North America is unknown owing to the lack of high-resolution palaeodemographic data from regions across and beyond the greater Southwest, where archaeological radiocarbon data are often the only available proxy for investigating these palaeodemographic processes. Radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest suggest widespread population collapses from AD 1300 to 1600. However, radiocarbon data have potential biases caused by variable radiocarbon sample preservation, sample collection and the nonlinearity of the radiocarbon calibration curve. In order to be confident in the wider trends seen in radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest, here we focus on regions that have multiple palaeodemographic proxies and compare those proxies to radiocarbon time series. We develop a new method for time series analysis and comparison between dendrochronological data and radiocarbon data. Results confirm a multiple proxy decline in human populations across the Upland US Southwest, Central Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande from AD 1300 to 1600. These results lend confidence to single proxy radiocarbon-based reconstructions of palaeodemography outside the Southwest that suggest post-AD 1300 population declines in many parts of North America. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography'.

Keywords: Southwest USA; dates-as-data; dendrochronology; palaeodemography; radiocarbon summed probability distributions.

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Conflict of interest statement

We have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The UUSW as defined in this study (region with black border). The white dashed area represents the UUSW as defined in [23]. VEP study areas are white boxes. CMV: Central Mesa Verde; NRG: Northern Rio Grande.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The number of radiocarbon and tree-ring dates by county in this study.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The number of sites with radiocarbon and tree-ring dates by county in this study.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Radiocarbon and tree-ring density distributions in the UUSW (a), CMV (b), and NRG (c) regions, and VEP population estimates for the CMV and NRG. The dark orange tree-ring density curve smooths the raw tree-ring density (light orange) using a 21-year centre-aligned Gaussian kernel with a 5-year standard deviation, following [23]. In (a), the radiocarbon density (y-axis) is scaled by a factor of 3 to facilitate comparison with the tree-ring density over the target time period. The radiocarbon and tree-ring densities (y-axes) in (b) and (c) are scaled such that the area under their densities is equal to the area under the VEP population estimates (i.e. the cumulative population). (Online version in colour.)
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