The record of human attempts to deal with environmental and demographic challenges is like a library of completed experiments. We can see which ones were successful and which ones weren’t, and we can trace the consequences of societal choices over hundreds of years. Human migration and water management are significant challenges today, exacerbated by climate change. By better understanding how similar phenomena played out at moments of environmental crisis and over long periods of time in past societies, we can learn how those communities survived and thrived, and apply those lessons to the present. Resources, Stress, and Population Dynamics in Premodern Urban Societies sought to find novel ways to use the archaeological record to explore the relationship between human migration and mobility, environmental or climate change, and change or crisis in urbanized human societies in three areas of the ancient world (the Maya region, the Italian peninsula, and the lower Danube and the Black Sea coast). By employing new methods in archaeological science, including environmental geochemistry, genetic analysis of ancient DNA, LiDAR and remote sensing, and isotopic analysis of human bones and teeth, it can illuminate how those communities survived and thrived, and apply those lessons to the present.