TY - JOUR

T1 - Non-linear landscape and cultural response to sea-level rise

AU - Barnett, Robert

AU - Charman, Dan J.

AU - Johns, Charles

AU - Ward, Sophie

AU - Bevan, Andrew

AU - Bradley, Sarah L.

AU - Cambridge, Kevin

AU - Fyfe, Ralph M.

AU - Gehrels, W. Roland

AU - Hatton, Jackie

AU - Khan, Nicole S.

AU - Marshall, Peter

AU - Maezumi, S. Yoshi

AU - Mills, Steve

AU - Mulville, Jacqui

AU - Perez, Marta

AU - Roberts, Helen M.

AU - Scourse, James D.

AU - Shepherd, Francis

AU - Stevens, Todd

N1 - Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). We acknowledge financial support provided for the Lyonesse Project (DOI: 10.5284/1025045) by English Heritage (now Historic England) through the Historic Environment Enabling Programme and the National Heritage Protection Commissions (grant number 5253). S.L.W. acknowledges the financial support provided by the Welsh Government and Higher Education Funding Council for Wales through the Sêr Cymru National Research Network for Low Carbon, Energy, and Environment (Returning Fellowship grant).

PY - 2020/11/4

Y1 - 2020/11/4

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

U2 - 10.1126/sciadv.abb6376

DO - 10.1126/sciadv.abb6376

M3 - Article

C2 - 33148641

VL - 6

JO - Science Advances

JF - Science Advances

SN - 2375-2548

IS - 45

M1 - eabb6376

ER -