Island Colonization and Environmental Sustainability in the Postglacial Mediterranean

Island environments present challenges to human colonization, but we have a poor understanding of how environmental difference drives heterogeneous patterns of insular settlement. In this paper, we assess which environmental and geographic variables positively or negatively affect the long-term sust...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSustainability Vol. 13; no. 6; p. 3383
Main Authors Plekhov, Daniel, Leppard, Thomas P., Cherry, John F.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 18.03.2021
Subjects
Archaeology
Colonization
Demographic variables
Farming
Human settlements
Hunter-gatherers
Hunting
Islands
Land settlement
Net Primary Productivity
Species richness
Sustainability
Eurasia
Africa
Mediterranean Area
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Summary:Island environments present challenges to human colonization, but we have a poor understanding of how environmental difference drives heterogeneous patterns of insular settlement. In this paper, we assess which environmental and geographic variables positively or negatively affect the long-term sustainability of human settlement on islands. Using the postglacial Mediterranean basin as a case study, we assess the impact of area, isolation index, species richness, and net primary productivity (NPP) on patterns of island occupation for both hunter-gatherer and agropastoral populations. We find that models involving area most effectively accounts for sustainability in hunter-gatherer island settlement. The agropastoral data are noisier, perhaps due to culturally specific factors responsible for the distribution of the data; nonetheless, we show that area and NPP exert profound influence over sustainability of agropastoral island settlement. We conclude by suggesting that this relates to the capacity of these variables to impact demographic robusticity directly.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su13063383