Cultural responses to the 8.2 ka climatic event in North China: Insights from the Jiahu archaeological site

While the 8.2 ka abrupt cooling event is increasingly recognised as a major Holocene climatic anomaly, archaeological discussions of its cultural consequences have often been framed in terms of societal distress, including the collapse and abandonment of settlements. However, prehistoric communities must have responded in more diverse ways. This paper investigates the site-based socio-ecological adaptations at the Jiahu settlement in North China, which persisted throughout the entire 8.2 ka climatic downturn, offering insights into how some prehistoric settlements may have exhibited resilience in the face of abrupt environmental change. Drawing on the Baseline Resilience Indicator for Communities (BRIC) model, we integrate environmental and archaeological data to assess key resilience indicators within this prehistoric cultural sequence. Our results indicate that while many settlements across northern China suffered decline or complete abandonment during this interval, Jiahu offers an alternative response scenario, where systemic flexibility supported longer-term adaptation, enabling the local community to survive, endure and even evolve new strategies. Moreover, the abrupt environmental stress may also have displaced regional populations into similar kinds of more resilient environmental locales, generating population “packing”, increased inter-group exchange, and the localized innovation of new adaptive strategies. We argue that local social-ecological systems, buffered by robust natural and cultural resources, may have experienced the 8.2 ka downturn in terms of a catalyst that produced a cascade of wider social and behavioural adjustments. Our tentative conclusions underline the need to move beyond simplistic narratives of cultural decline driven by the sudden onset of harsh environmental conditions, and instead to examine the complex, varied and contingent ways in which prehistoric societies responded to abrupt environmental downturns.