Climate Change Adaptation and Social Resilience in the Lake Chad Basin: A Long-term Archaeological Perspective

The Lake Chad Basin is currently experiencing one of the world's most severe climate-driven ecological crises, with the lake having lost approximately ninety percent of its surface area since the 1960s, yet the long-term human capacity for adaptation to climate stress in this region is poorly documented in the archaeological record. This dissertation develops a long-term archaeological perspective on climate change adaptation and social resilience in the Lake Chad Basin, using a theoretically sophisticated resilience framework applied to a multi-proxy archaeological dataset spanning ten thousand years of human occupation. The study presents new excavation data from four stratified sites in the Nigerian sector of the basin, integrated with palaeoenvironmental proxy records including pollen sequences, stable isotopic data from lake sediment cores, and archaeobotanical assemblages, to reconstruct the co-evolutionary dynamics of human societies and ecological systems through Holocene climate variability. Analytical results identify five major phases of climate-driven social stress, each characterized by distinctive archaeological signatures including settlement nucleation, subsistence diversification, and evidence for heightened inter-community exchange. Critically, the study demonstrates that communities that maintained diverse social networks, mixed economies, and institutional flexibility consistently showed shorter recovery times from climate-induced stress than those exhibiting economic specialization and rigid social hierarchies. These findings generate empirically grounded lessons about adaptive capacity with direct policy relevance for contemporary Lake Chad Basin development planning, contributing to the growing field of archaeological climate science and demonstrating the unique value of deep-time human-environment data for present-day resource management. Keywords: climate change adaptation, Lake Chad Basin, Holocene, social resilience, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.