Deforestation (Other Keyword)
1-5 (5 Records)
In this chapter, we use both original and repeat images of Vermont to document how the landscape has responded to human actions that include deforestation, reforestation, and road building. We use three examples to demonstrate how repeat photography of the same site at different times can be used to document—both qualitatively and quantitatively— landscape response to human actions with the thought that, by examining past landscape responses, we can better inform future land-use decisions. The...
Deforestation of Pacific Islands Driven by a Combination of Land Use, Fire, and Climate (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...
The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context: Case Studies in Residence and Vulnerability (2014)
In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic "collapses," including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750), were caused not solely by climate change-related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts...
Identifying and applying a "canopy effect" as a marker for deforestation: stable isotope analysis of small artiodactyl and rodent fauna from hunter-gatherer sites in Central Africa (2015)
Applying stable carbon isotopic analyses to discern anthropogenic and natural deforestation events is both useful and important to current deforestation and landscape modification research. The goal of this project is to identify a shift in δ13C content of mammalian teeth caused by the thinning of canopied forests using the "canopy effect" hypothesis. This pilot study tests the merits of the canopy effect hypothesis as applied to deforestation signatures using two extant village sites on the...
"This Coffee Only Succeeds when the Wood is Cleared and Burned off": Slavery, Agricultural Practice, and Deforestation in 19th Century Jamaica (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the opening decades of the 19th century, Jamaica experienced its first coffee boom. As planters raced to create productive plantations in the eastern and central highlands of the island, they employed gangs of enslaved laborers to clear cut an untold number of acres of old...