Circumpolar Job Talk: "Behavioral adaptations to environmental extremes: Evidence from northern Patagonia" by Raven Garvey

"Relative to other periods, there are few recorded sites of middle Holocene age (8000 – 4000 years ago) in northern Argentine Patagonia. Traditional interpretations attribute this phenomenon to abandonment in the face of prolonged droughts, but new evidence indicates that a reduced human presence is not the most likely explanation. Instead, it appears that people altered their use of the landscape and available resources in ways that made them less archaeologically visible. Taking northern Patagonia as the primary example, this paper considers ecological, demographic and temporal influences on behavioral adaptations, particularly in extreme or highly variable environments."