biodiversity (Other Keyword)
1-5 (5 Records)
The "big issue" of my career has been long-term human impact on the environment, an inherently processual concern. Working on ancient west Asian plant remains, ethnographic analogy and modern vegetation analogs helped me explain how the the demand for energy lead to deforestation and increasing dung fuel use, both of which are traceable through archaeobotanical study. Seeds preserved in dung fuel, in turn, allow us to identify agropastoral practices that created new environmental niches for...
Ecology and Human Habitation of Andean Forests (2018)
People have altered the naturally forested areas of the tropical Andes for natural resources and as places for settlements. The forests collectively represent a global biodiversity hotspot, with many unique species. Environmental gradients are abrupt, with dramatic changes in temperature regimes with altitude, but also with switches in humidity from dry to pluvial depending on exposure to prevailing winds. The steep environmental gradients create dispersal barriers to plants and animals,...
The Evolution of Plant Resource Diversity in Precolonial Puerto Rico with Direct Implications for the Rest of the Greater Antilles (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Except for Jamaica, the earliest human occupations in the Greater Antilles date to ca. 6000 cal yr BP. Contrary to older ideas, the view taking shape now is that survival strategies incorporated a range of plant domesticates along with wild resources obtained through...
The Historical Ecology of South Florida Shark Diversity and Indigenous Harvest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sharks are among the world’s most endangered vertebrate taxa, including recent estimates of approximately 71% loss in abundance over the past 50 years due to human impacts. Zooarchaeological baselines of shark diversity, distribution, and exploitation hold great promise for contributing essential historical context in the assessment of contemporary patterns...
Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Archaeozoology and Paleontology at the Basin of Mexico: A Reappraisal 40 Years after Early Views (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Back in 1970s, a great effort was undertaken to synthethize the knowledge of human and environmental relationships in the Basin of Mexico, which could be extended to at least 24,000 years BP. Since then, further studies were warranted after initial results and research has been...