Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - In times of emergency, the ancient and modern worlds have forced people to make difficult decisions when they are most vulnerable.
Questions like "How do we survive when the world strikes again?" and "How do we cope when crises hit?" have always been on our minds and those of our ancestors. What happens during an extreme incident when the food supply fails and resources dwindle? Should we store food, leave our homes, or seek help from neighbors? Researchers often refer to such decisions and their outcomes as "resilience."
Credit: Pixabay - BulentYILDIZ - Public Domain
Resilience, often seen as the solution to many crises faced by societies across different times and places, is usually expressed in abstract terms or as a seemingly stable trait of certain individuals, groups, or social systems that enables them to endure external crises. However, resilience is best understood as the sum of numerous individual decisions and strategies. It is neither inherent nor unchangeable, and no universal strategy reliably works across all types of crises.
Archaeologists from Aarhus University and the University of Colorado used computer simulations to measure the effectiveness and costs associated with the four most common resilience strategies used by people in the past and still employed by many today: investment in infrastructure, exchange, mobility, and economic adjustment.
Mobility, investment in infrastructure and strong social ties protect against crises
"We noticed early in our study that economic adjustment performed significantly worse than other strategies across a wide range of crisis conditions. In short, if a crisis hits, it will not be enough to work harder to obtain the necessary resources if there are not enough resources available in the first place," says lead author Colin Wren.
Summary of the four buffering mechanisms. Credit: Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr0314
Mobility, which involves relocating to a safer area, has shown to be an effective strategy with moderate costs. However, its success depends on the availability of better locations to move to. Exchange, where resources are shared through social networks, combines elements of both mobility and investment strategies. On the other hand, economic adjustment—modifying one's behavior in response to a crisis—has been identified as the least effective approach.
Future Crisis Management
The study's conclusions are supported by ethnographic and archaeological analyses, which show that different groups engaged in all the resilience strategies studied, resulting in different outcomes.
"What this study also shows is that we can and should look into the past to better understand what resilience strategies worked for our ancestors, so that we can choose the best ones for the kind of crisis we expect to see more of in the future", says Iza Romanowska, one of the study's authors. She does add a caveat though:
"Our results are thought-provoking, even though they come from a fairly simplistic computer simulation and therefore probably can't be applied directly to today's world in a one-to-one way.”
The study was published in Science Advances
Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer
