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REDMAN
The past can be characterized by periods of changing and stable relationships between human groups and their
environment. In this article, I argue that use of resilience theory as a conceptual framework will assist archaeologists in interpreting the past in ways that are interesting and potentially relevant to contemporary issues. Many of the authors in this In Focus section
primarily concentrate on the relationships associated with patterns of human extraction of resources and the impacts of those human
activities on the continuing condition of the ecosystem. These processes are, of course, embedded in a complex web of relationships
that are based on multiple interactions of underlying patterns and processes of both the ecological and social domains. In this article, I
introduce a resilience theory perspective to argue that these transformations were characterized by very different reorganizations of the
socioecological landscape and were the product of a variety of factors that operated at different scales of geography, time, and social
organization. [Keywords: resilience theory, socioecological systems, panarchy, land degradation]
essential collaborators when designing large-scale environmental research programs (for similar calls to action, see
Barker 1996; Lipe and Redman 1996; van der Leeuw and
Redman 2002). Both intellectual and practical barriers impede engagement, and in this article I seek to suggest one
avenue around these barriers. The appearance of this In Focus collection documents that this pattern is slowly changing and demonstrates that we have the tools and resources
to be significant players.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF ARCHAEOLOGY
First, authors of contemporary studies usually have to content themselves with investigating a historical cycle that
is truncatedthat has not completed one cyclewhereas
archaeological and other historical case studies can provide not only completed cycles but multiple completed cycles. This allows greater understanding into the dynamics
of phases of a single cycle, of linked cycles, and of how
cycles might change as systems reorganize. It also permits
more in-depth monitoring of the slow processes and lowfrequency events that appear to be the key to ultimate system resilience (Gunderson and Folke 2003; Scheffer et al.
2001). Although ecologists know that ecosystem structure
and function may take decades or centuries to fully respond
to disturbance, ecological studies almost exclusively examine ecosystem dynamics over intervals of a few days to a
few years. Rare decades-to-century-scale studies suggest that
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are dynamic and the relationships to environmental components are recursive. Similarly, some archaeologists and
anthropologists have challenged the perspective that indigenous people were always in harmony with nature,
using evidence that, for millennia, humans substantially altered and often degraded their environments (Bottema et al.
1990; Butzer 1996; Krech 2000; Leveau et al. 1999; McIntosh
et al. 2000; Redman 1999). Moreover, recent research is
suggesting that human modification may stabilize ecosystem functions but will do so with drastic consequences for
humans and ecosystems when the social structures that
support these practices collapse (Butzer 1996; Fisher et al.
2003; van Andel et al. 1990). At the same time, there are
ample examples of archaeologically known societies that
formulated highly successful solutions when confronted
with major environmental challenges, such as changing
climatic patterns (Fagan 2004; McIntosh et al. 2000) and
widespread desertification (Leveau et al. 1999; van der
Leeuw 1998).
The ever increasing influence of human activity on biophysical processes demands that human society be able to
assess and cope with rapidly accelerating anthropogenic environmental change. This task is made more difficult because environmental changes and their repercussions may
occur across multiple spatial scales. Further, although some
may play out slowly over long time spans, the system may
surpass a tipping point in which dramatic impacts themselves occur quite rapidly (Carpenter et al. 1999).
RESILIENCE THEORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
To work more effectively within an interdisciplinary framework and to have results that can be incorporated into ongoing debates about societys future, archaeologists should
examine the utility of perspectives derived from resilience
theory (see Redman and Kinzig 2003 for a fuller discussion). Resilience theory seeks to understand the source and
role of changeparticularly the kinds of change that are
transformingin systems that are adaptive (Gunderson et
al. 1995; Holling et al. 2002; Levin 1999).
Four key features of ecosystems provide the underlying assumptions of resilience theory (Holling and Gunderson 2002:2527; Redman and Kinzig 2003). We believe
these features and assumptions are worthy of evaluating
for coupled socioecological systems and from a long-term
perspective. First, change is neither continuous and gradual nor consistently chaotic. Rather, it is episodic with periods of slow accumulation of natural capital, punctuated by sudden releases and reorganizations of those legacies. Episodic behavior is caused by interactions between
fast and slow variables. Second, spatial and temporal attributes are neither uniform nor scale invariant; rather, patterns and processes are patchy and discontinuous at all
scales. Therefore, scaling up from small to large cannot be
a process of simple aggregation. Third, ecosystems do not
have a single equilibrium with homeostatic controls; rather,
multiple equilibria commonly define functionally different
states. Destabilizing forces are important in maintaining
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FIGURE 1. A stylized representation of the four ecosystem functions (r, K, , and ) organized into an adaptive cycle (from Holling
and Gunderson 2002; with permission from Island Press).
tightly bound accumulation of biomass becomes increasingly fragile until it is suddenly released by external agents
(Holling and Gunderson 2002:3335). Resilience theorists
add a key fourth function: reorganization ( phase), in
which resources are reorganized into a new system to take
advantage of opportunities. The innovation here is that this
new system may resemble its predecessor or have fundamentally new functional characteristics (i.e., be in the
same or a new basin of attraction in a multiple-stablestate system). These four phases have been organized into
an adaptive cycle metaphor that allows one to analyze
and compare specific ecosystem trajectories against this
theory.
This cycle is distinct from the metaphors more commonly used by social scientists in two important ways. First,
life-cycle models, or other well-known social models, also
break social change into phases, but they often imply a
gradual change between phases and a fixed proportion of
the cycle spent in each phase. The adaptive cycle, described
above, is more contextual in that, in each case, the phases
may be of greater or lesser duration. Further, as some of us
argue, some societies do not go through all phases of the cycle. For example, some societies (and their ecosystems) will
spend more time in the r phase (exploitation) accumulating
capital, whereas other socioecosystems (like our own) may
spend most of its time in the K phase (conservation) trying
to hold onto the high level of capital it has already accumulated. Second, unlike a model in which peak conditions are
followed by a substantial period of decline or senescence
before collapse, the adaptive cycle suggests that in many
societies the phase, or collapse, comes quickly and unexpectedly during the peak of the K phase. The surprisingly
rapid demise of numerous archaeologically known societies
gives credence to this assertion.
Individual adaptive cycles are nested in a hierarchy
across time and space (see Figure 2). These nested hierarchies may have a stabilizing effect because of the fact that
they provide the memory of the past and of the distant
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repeated cycles may not follow the same pathway or result in analogous systems. Some systems, self-consciously
or not, may work to remain in the r or K phase for long periods of time, whereas other systems, small-scale societies
in particular, may move through the adaptive cycle relatively rapidly without ever accumulating substantial capital. In this perspective, the K phase is no longer viewed as
a stable phase interrupted only by external perturbations;
rather, a triggering event causing release and collapse also
can occur as the result of an internal change in the system, often having inadvertently developed as part of the
strategy to maintain the system in K. The second feature is
one already mentionedthat these adaptive cycles appear
to occur across scales but not continuously. Instead, it is
assumed that there are only a handful of spatialtemporal
scales that exhibit strong signatures in the real world; it
is the interaction among adaptive cycles at characteristic
scales that determine what size distributions and levels of
organizational integration are commonly observed.
Adding the long-term and social perspective of the archaeologist to resilience theory, which emanated from ecological observations with a mixing of economics and some
political theory, has resulted in a number of initial reconsiderations. Fundamental to the early conceptualization of the
panarchy was that systems or participant units of small scale
were able to change quickly and larger-scale units moved
through the cycle more slowly. In many ways, this is also
true of social and socioecological systems, but there are important exceptions that require a reconceptualization. For
example, some aspects of small social units, like the nuclear family, have not changed for millennia and are shared
across the globe, whereas some large-scale social units, such
as ruling dynasties or the global economy, can experience
radical transformations very quickly. This pertains to a second important insight, which is thinking that socioecological system space and time are not the only scales. Rather,
organizational level should be viewed independently as a
third dimension that sometimes associates with size but often does not. A third insight, shared by all social scientists,
is that humans participate in the ecosystem in a distinctive way, not just because of their dominance and technology. The key is that humans, as individuals and as arranged
into higher-level organizational units, are self-reflective
evaluating where they and their system areand goal oriented. That is, they make decisions, in part, to move the system toward a desired state. This quality of humans as part of
the ecosystem also applies to humans who act as resilience
theorists. That is, as scientistsobservers, we perceive phenomena through the lens of our own personality and often
inject our own value-laden objectives into the models we
propose. No matter how strongly we feel that a sustainable world requires economic equality and purposely diminished consumption, the archaeological record does not
offer many case studies as exemplars of those patterns to
emulate. One has to be vigilant to minimize the personal
biases and unfounded, but desirable, assumptions in models we propose for a sustainable future.
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C HARLES L. R EDMAN International Institute for Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-3211
NOTES
Acknowledgments. Although many people have influenced my
thinking on these topics, three have specifically contributed to the
ideas expressed in this article. Ann P. Kinzig introduced me to resilience theory and continues to mentor me in its ever changing
refinements. Scott Ingram conducted the restudy of Hohokam population in relation to stream flow. Margaret Nelson advised both
Scott and me on to how to interpret the Hohokam in a resilience
perspective.
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