Human niches, abandonment cycling, and climates Vernon L. Scarborough 1 Received: 28 September 2015 / Accepted: 26 October 2015 / Published online: 3 November 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract The stressors associated with the amount of water available to a society and its engineered landscape are shown to affect cultural longevity in a region. The long-term affects of aridity may actually accommodate occupation and reoccupation of a previously established human niche constructed and built by a significantly different cultural group following the abandonment of that setting by the earlier colonizers. Cultural turnover can be rapid and turbulent. On the other hand, wetter semitropical regions are suggested to be yet more vulnerable to cultural ‘‘cycling’’ and result in extended periods of fragmentation and abandonment if an occupying population does not maintain a previously altered or human niche constructed setting. Here, the longevity of a society is maintained through deep time and space, with the original colonists responsible for continuous and frequently a low-density residency. What is then identifiable as Maya or Khmer has a less interrupted culture history than that of a Near Eastern Assyrian or Babylonian culture history. Keywords Human niche construction Á Abandonments Á Cultural cycling Á US Southwest Á Maya Á Ancient Near East Introduction Human niche construction is not the first theory that makes an attempt to analyze and describe interactions between human interventions and landscape changes. The concept of human niche construction (HNC) (Kendal et al. 2011) shares much with a concept like landesque capital (LC)—‘‘any investment in land with an anticipated life well beyond that of the present crop, or crop cycle’’ as proposed by Brookfield (1984; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). HNC includes phenotypic changes within humans themselves, something LC does not entail. & Vernon L. Scarborough Vernon.Scarborough@UC.Edu 1 University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA 123 Water Hist (2015) 7:381–396 DOI 10.1007/s12685-015-0147-5