Human-environment interactions (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
This paper is the second part of a two-part dialogue on the use of taphonomy as an archaeological technique in both prehistoric archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary. Part II explores how using the concept of taphonomy to study the accumulation of harmful toxins in the environment and in the human body opens up new avenues of study for an archaeology of human-environment interactions in the contemporary nuclear and industrial age. Intimately tied to the waste of human activity,...
Environment, history and resilience of archaic coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers from the Atacama Desert, northern Chile (2015)
The coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the most extreme environments of the Andean area. However, the high productivity of the Pacific Ocean facilitated the peopling of this territory as early as 12.000 years cal BP and also a continual occupation of hunting-gathering-fishing communities throughout the Holocene. In this paper we discuss significant environmental changes during the Middle Holocene, as well as the systematic interaction of local communities with inland...
Human responses to Late Pleistocene environmental change in South-Western France (2015)
A key question for archaeologists studying the late Pleistocene is how human populations responded and adapted to the dramatic, and often rapid, global climatic changes which characterised this glacial period. Using a range of archaeological data attributed to the Upper/Final Magdalenian and Azilian techno-complexes (15 000-10 000 uncal BP), this paper assesses the evidence for changes in settlement patterns and human demography during the Late Pleistocene in South-Western France. Data on...
A Natural and Unnatural History of Faunal Change in Southwestern New Mexico since AD 500 (2017)
An important intersection between archaeology and the study of natural history lies in understanding the long-term processes of human-environment interaction that affected local biotas in the past and have shaped contemporary landscapes. This study integrates information from archaeological faunal assemblages and historic and modern data from the major watersheds of southwestern New Mexico—specifically, the upper Gila-San Francisco and Mimbres drainages—to examine changes in the status and...
The Negotiation of Political Subjectivity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (2015)
Thinking of political subjectification as the processes by which individuals recognize themselves as subjects to authority, this paper pursues the negotiation of this subjectivity for people living within the purview of the ancient Neo-Assyrian empire. Negotiation resides between the poles of subjugation and resistance to authority, and constitutes the ways in which people participate in defining the contours of their socio-political positions. In the provinces of Upper Mesopotamia in the...
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...
Toward effective cyber-infrastructure support of socio-environmental research (2015)
Understanding coupled human and natural systems is a major research focus for the social and natural sciences. Scholars interested in historic environmental conditions (including those of deep pre-history) cannot simply extrapolate the past from the present. Instead, they need environmental knowledge specific to their spatial-temporal problem contexts. However, in accounting for environmental change they are likely to find that state-of-the-art data on past environments are difficult to discover...
A Tropical Treasure Trove: Preliminary Assessment of Archaeological Faunal Remains from Culebra Bay, Guanacaste, Costa Rica (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over 50 years, excavations in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, have yielded a large amount of well-preserved faunal materials, yet few zooarchaeological studies have been carried out. To explore the research potential of archaeofaunal materials in the region, I will present data from several sites around the Culebra bay area. These...