Palaeoecology (Other Keyword)
1-7 (7 Records)
This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The remains of fossil animals represent an abundant dataset by which to address a variety of important questions relating to human evolution, including the ecological conditions in which our hominin ancestors evolved. However, because of the multitude of processes that modify or even remove remains from the fossil record, analytical techniques that utilize them cannot assume that the once living...
Climate Change and Polyculture Agroforestry Systems: Examples from Amazonian Dark Earths (2018)
In this presentation, we discuss pre-Columbian Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) polyculture agroforestry systems and its implications for management and conservation efforts on Amazonian sustainable futures under current threat from climate change and development. We present and compare new multi-proxy paleoclimate, palaeoecological and archaeobotanical data from two mid to late Holocene records of land use history of ADE in Santarem (Lower Amazon) and the Itenez Forest Reserve (SW Amazonia). Our data...
The environmental context of Prôto-Je culture at Pinhal da Serra, RS, Brazil – insights from palaeoecology (2015)
Understanding the purposes and associations of burial monuments and sacred built landscapes in the Formative period of the Americas is an important research goal among archaeologists. A key step that can help us to better understand the social and spatial organisation of these cultures is determining the ecological and environmental characteristics of the landscapes within which these cultures lived and developed. Created by the Je group in south-eastern Brazil, and with more than 30 pit houses...
An extant example of warm-climate forager gastrophagy and its implications for extinct hominin diets. (2015)
Accounts of gastrophagy (consumption of prey stomach material) are widespread in ethnography. The practice is recorded from different latitudes, subsistence strategies and with a wide variety of prey; however, many such reports are anecdotal. Conversely, where recent authors mention gastrophagy it is typically marginal to their main research. Little is therefore known about the frequency, seasonality, demographic factors, species composition, and relative dietary contribution of gastrophagy and...
Light islands in a sea of dark rainforest: Human influence on fire, climate and biodiversity in the Australian tropics (2016)
The use of fire in Australian Aboriginal society has been well documented and has been pivotal to arguments about human impact on the Australian biota. Continuous and well-dated palaeoecological sequences from the humid rainforests of NE Queensland are beginning to reveal detailed records of vegetation transformation and shifting fire regimes within rainforest environments. The archaeological record is also providing new insights into plant exploitation and adaptation strategies to enable people...
North of the Wall: Archaeo-ecological Approaches to Scotland’s elusive Paleolithic Past (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than a century, Paleolithic Scotland was missing from the textbooks, presumed nonexistent. A low-density of archaeological finds was compounded by a research tradition that persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the Holocene, a situation at odds...
Scales and visibility of human-environment interactions in western Amazonia: the case of the geoglyph builders (2015)
A debate that has received much attention in recent years is the nature and scale of pre-Columbian impact in the Amazon lowlands. While the notion that Amazonia is a "pristine wilderness" has long been rejected, several papers have proposed that human impact in western regions was more sporadic and on a smaller scale than impacts in central and eastern regions, and that western Amazonia supported sparse pre-Columbian populations. The discovery of over 400 geometrically-patterned earthworks in...