Island colonization and environmental sustainability in the postglacial mediterranean

Abstract

Island environments present challenges to human colonization, but we have a poor understanding of how environmental difference drives heterogeneous patterns of insular settlement. In this paper, we assess which environmental and geographic variables positively or negatively affect the long‐term sustainability of human settlement on islands. Using the postglacial Mediterranean basin as a case study, we assess the impact of area, isolation index, species richness, and net primary productivity (NPP) on patterns of island occupation for both hunter‐gatherer and agropas-toral populations. We find that models involving area most effectively accounts for sustainability in hunter‐gatherer island settlement. The agropastoral data are noisier, perhaps due to culturally spe-cific factors responsible for the distribution of the data; nonetheless, we show that area and NPP exert profound influence over sustainability of agropastoral island settlement. We conclude by sug-gesting that this relates to the capacity of these variables to impact demographic robusticity directly.