The 8.2 ka BP Holocene climate change event and human population resilience in northwest Atlantic Europe Seren Griffiths a, * , Erick Robinson b a Archaeology, School of Forensics and Applied Science, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK b Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, Laramie,1000 East University Avenue, WY, 82071, USA article info Article history: Received 9 March 2017 Received in revised form 16 September 2017 Accepted 12 October 2017 Available online xxx abstract The 8.2 ka BP event may represent the largest, most abrupt Holocene climate event. This paper examines the impact of this event on human activity in the middle Mesolithic. It produces Bayesian statistical models for the chronology of anthropogenic sites in northwest Atlantic Europe for a 1000 year time window around the event to explore evidence for human responses to climate change or resilience in the face of this climate change event. By approaching evidence for activity at sites in Denmark, Belgium, France, Ireland and Britain we explore evidence for differential temporally- and spatially-transgressive local responses to climate change in this period to move to sub-continental scales of activity. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Research on the impact of abrupt climate changes on Mesolithic societies promises to enhance our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of human-environment interactions during the early and middle Holocene across Europe. This knowledge will be gained by first asking if there is evidence for an impact on Mesolithic societies, then moving on to how these societies adapted to them. The latter focuses on what specific strategies were used to enhance adapta- tion and resilience to palaeoclimate events, such as changes in social organization, land use, subsistence, and technology. There are two levels of analysis that must be carried out to achieve these aims. The first level of analysis collects all archaeo- logical and palaeoenvironmental data from the particular region of interest and assesses whether it has the appropriate chronological resolution required to investigate potential impacts on human populations of abrupt climate events. At this level of analysis, one assessment that can be made of climate change is whether there is evidence for declines in human populations in the region of focus, or whether populations appeared to be resilient to climate change. This first level of analysis is essential for moving on to the second level of analysis that investigates the specific adaptive strategies that made Mesolithic societies resilient to abrupt climate changes. Over the past decade an increasing amount of research has been carried out on the impacts of the ‘8.2 ka BP event’ (Alley et al., 1997) on Mesolithic societies throughout Europe. In northwest Europe, hypotheses for the impact of this event have ranged from popula- tion crashes (Riede, 2009; Wicks and Mithen, 2014) to changes in social and/or technological organization (Riede, 2009; Robinson et al., 2013; Manninen, 2014). These analyses have relied on an approach that sums the probability distributions of individual calibrated radiocarbon dates and qualitatively matches the time- series wiggles in these distributions to different palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records. Many of these approaches have employed the sums of calibrated radiocarbon dates (summed probability distributions: SPDs). In this paper we propose another method to start to investigate the responses of Mesolithic populations to the 8.2 ka BP event. We argue that, while SPDs can provide important hypothesis devel- opment (e.g. Shennan et al., 2013), due to the continued uncer- tainty about the relative timing of regional ecosystem responses to the 8.2 ka BP event (Magny et al., 2003; Sepp€ a et al., 2007; Prasad et al., 2009; Zill en and Snowball, 2009; Giesecke et al., 2011; Torbenson et al., 2015), as well as its possible occurrence within a longer period of climate change (R€ ohling and P€ alike, 2005), we must move beyond initial SPDs to a more Bayesian approach that selects sites within a region that fall within a wider ‘envelope’ before, during, and after the event. Moreover, recent treatments of radiocarbon dates as proxies for human population levels have adopted a chronology which interrogates data at the precision of 200 year bins (e.g. Crema et al., 2016). This method is adopted to down weight regions where lots of research has occurred and * Corresponding author. E-mail address: sgriffiths7@uclan.ac.uk (S. Griffiths). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.10.017 1040-6182/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Quaternary International xxx (2017) 1e7 Please cite this article in press as: Griffiths, S., Robinson, E., The 8.2 ka BP Holocene climate change event and human population resilience in northwest Atlantic Europe, Quaternary International (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.10.017