Sambaqui and climate change
- The southeast coast of Brazil, 2,500 years ago. For centuries, stable communities that were mostly fed with seafood began to dismantle, depending on the size and quantity of sambaque.
The Sambaqui or Concheros are artificial hills of shellfish that these communities consumed, so their study allows to know many things about these population nuclei.
Some experts have believed that the decline of the shelters occurred with the expansion of ceramics and agriculture. With other food sources, fish and mollusc dependency decreased and shells decreased. But a group led by researchers Alice Toso and André Colonose has completely turned this theory, as announced in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, that new economic activities did not affect the abandonment of the old way of life, but the need to develop more complex activities derived from its exhaustion.
And at its core is climate change. The cooling of the climate some 2,500 years ago caused a drop in sea level. In the words of Toso, “the bays and the lake were reduced, thereby reducing marine resources and, moreover, they were not easily foreseeable. In the end, the communities had to be dispersed, forming smaller social units.”
The highest concentration of sambaqui in Brazil is in Babitonga Bay and researchers have studied the human, animal and plant footprints of the area to determine the chronology of the cultural decline of the patrons. These prehistoric populations had to compete, all of a sudden, for the increasingly scarce marine resources, and this adaptation process took a long time, more than a thousand years, to conclude that ceramics expanded about 1,200 years ago.
In short, this study shows that stable coastal communities, despite their high degree of cooperation and resilience, can easily disappear by climate change.
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