historical ecology (Other Keyword)
101-125 (989 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The oral tradition of the Chilla landscape distinguishes two main stories: the first one portrays the apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the second one narrates the Mayan origins of its inhabitants. However, Chilla is in El Oro province, where a monumental pyramid and other neighboring sites correspond to the...
A Movement at the Margins: An Icelandic Rural Transformation at the Edge of the 19th Century Atlantic World (2018)
In the early modern Atlantic World, core/periphery mercantile economics ascribed a marginal place for Iceland. The island's role in trade involved the production of low-cost bulk goods destined for markets mostly via Denmark into the 19th century. The focal area of this paper, the rural and upland Mývatn region, was in some ways socially and ecologically marginal even within Iceland. The growing environment was affected by unpredictable cold weather while volatile erosion zones hemmed local...
NABO Artifacts
Project for artifact data from Norse sites across the North Atlantic islands, including Iceland, Greenland, and Shetland.
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 Nazi Hideout of South America: Studies on the Teyu Cuare 1945 Neighborhoods (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of the Nazi refuge on the border of Argentina and Paraguay during 2015, built around the year 1945 and abandoned shortly after, led to work inside it first to demonstrate the hypothesis of use and chronology. Last year, the mapping of the area and the survey of the surroundings intensified, finding new structures and groups strategically located...
A New Hypothetical Framework of Understanding the Evolution of Agriculture in the Lower Yangzi Region (2018)
Although a number of studies in recent years have contributed fresh knowledge to our understanding of the origins and development of agriculture in the Lower Yangzi, updated data have made this issue even more complicated. The empirical evidence shows very little information about any hunter-gatherers who might have lived in this area and indicates that, 10,000 years ago, humans first appeared here as successful resource managers or niche constructors. The human ecosystem characterized by...
No Empty Landscapes: Livelihood, Agency, and Transformation in Early Inuit South Greenland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kujataa—South Greenland—constitutes a verdant environmental niche and was one of the most populous regions in Arctic Greenland, occupied by the Norse between ca. AD 985 and 1450 and Inuit in the following centuries until today. Whereas Norse society has been much studied, Inuit archaeology and history in Kujataa has been...
OCA—Culture, Origins, and Environment: Archaeological Collaborative Research in the Lower Xingu (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The project investigates the historical ecology of a poorly studied area: the confluence of the Xingu and Amazon Rivers, in the lower Amazon region. By investigating distinct lines of archaeological evidence on a regional scale, it addresses, as an underlying research theme, the...
Osteobiography of an ancient ‘woolly’ dog from Tseshaht territory on western Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The wool dog is a precontact breed of domesticated dog that has held specific cultural importance within Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia and Washington for thousands of years. Although wool dogs no longer persist as a distinct breed on the Northwest Coast, information about these dogs is retained in ethnohistorical records and...
Paleoecology and Geoarchaeology of the Buenavista Valley, Petén, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We have studied the long-term environmental change and geoarchaeology of the Buenavista Valley in the region of El Zotz and La Cuernavilla in Guatemala’s Petén through multiple NSF grants from the 2000s to an NGS Grant for fieldwork in 2022. Past studies focused on the El Zotz reservoir, other regional reservoirs, dam...
A Paleogenomic Approach toward Reconstructing Bison Evolutionary History (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the end of the nineteenth century, overexploitation of bison reduced the population from an estimated 30 million to approximately 1,000 individuals. Despite the magnitude of this bottleneck, we do not understand how bison were affected at the genetic level, nor do we know past bison population...
A Palynological Approach to Colonial Agro-Pastoral Activities at LA 20,000, New Mexico (2018)
The local environment at LA 20,000 played a major role in influencing what kinds of activities could take place at the ranch built by Spanish colonizers in the 17th century. Palynological analysis is used here to understand how the environment changed over the course of the colonial era and, in turn, inform what types of activities were performed at the site. My research identifies and quantifies plant taxa using palynology in order to understand land use at LA 20,000, a 17th century rancho site...
The Past, Present and Future of Archaeological Lidar: A View from Southeast Asia (2018)
In the last five years multiple campaigns of airborne laser scanning (or lidar) have been conducted by archaeologists over Angkor-period sites in Cambodia and neighbouring countries such as Thailand. Analysis of the lidar data is still underway and will continue for many years both in the lab and on the ground, but some key outcomes have now been published, and it is already clear that the advent of lidar represents an important milestone in the history of archaeological remote sensing. This...
Pastoralism and Anthropogenic Land Cover Change (ALCC) Mapping (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. PAGES LandCover6k explores the relationship between past human activity and variability in the palaeoecological record to produce global maps of anthropogenic land-cover change based on sound archaeological knowledge and palaeoecological proxies, maps which will be available for use by the climate modelling community to better understand past climate dynamics....
Pervasive Landscapes of Inequality: Want and Abundance within a Hyperobject (2018)
As globalization matures, environmental, social, and economic factors continue to create ever-expanding landscapes of inequality. Among these drivers, human-driven environmental degradation has, for centuries, operated as a significant producer of inequality. Anthropogenic climate change today perpetuates and strengthens these multi-generational, regional-scale phenomena of landscape change. These processes, such as sediment erosion in Iceland during the past millennium, create a ‘second nature’...
Plant Use and Deep Ecology in Colonial New Mexico (2018)
Understanding the interactions between people and the landscape has long been a concern of archaeologists working in the American Southwest. A particular emphasis of this research has focused on understanding the way pre-colonial Pueblos altered the landscape for agricultural production. More recent studies have worked to incorporate indigenous voices into scholarly understandings of the landscape. So far, less attention has been paid to the way Hispano communities in New Mexico experienced and...
Political Ecology Materialized in a Medieval Icelandic Landscape (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...
Post-contact Times in Southern Patagonia (2018)
The history of the different indigenous hunter-gatherer groups that inhabited Patagonia since the Pleistocene was profoundly affected by the arrival of Europeans during the sixteenth century. This resulted in significant changes in various aspects of their lifeways, both archaeologically and ethnographically recorded. We integrate the available archaeological data of the post-contact period in southern Patagonia, along with ethnographic and historical data; showing the heterogeneous and complex...
Potentials and Pitfalls for ZooMS Analysis in the Pacific: A Case Study from Ofu Island (Manu‘a Group, American Samoa) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analysis in the Pacific is often limited by the large proportion of small, highly fragmented, non-diagnostic remains recovered from archaeological sites. Recent advances in biomolecular methods, including collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (a.k.a. ZooMS) enable increased taxonomic identifications and refine...
The Potomac Gorge (2018)
The Potomac Gorge is a canyon through which the river passes through the Falls Zone from Great Falls down to Washington, D.C. Ever since John Smith met Indians fishing below Little Falls in 1608, it has been widely assumed that the Potomac Gorge was a prime Native American fishing spot. The numerous prehistoric archaeological sites along this stretch of the river have often been interpreted as fishing stations. However, re-examination of the archaeological record in the Gorge, carried out as...
Precontact Animal Migrations and Intercept Hunting Strategies (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drivelines are a recognizable aspect of indigenously engineered landscapes on the High Plains and Rocky Mountain Front. Frequently associated with bison “kills,” these features are a subject of persistent interest to archaeologists. While the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of many Indigenous...
Precontact Indigenous Fire Stewardship: From the Valley to the Forest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous peoples lived in the Willamette Valley and adjacent highly productive upland forests for millennia and successfully coexisted with the region’s fire regimes. Like today, wildfires posed a threat to past societies and their livelihoods. Precontact Indigenous peoples of the Willamette...
Preliminary Chemical Fossil Assessment of Mid to Late Holocene Environment and Human-Forest Dynamics on the North Coast of New Guinea (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological interest in environmental and human impacts on society and ecosystems has intensified, with mounting evidence of global anthropogenic climate change and landscape modification. Tropical lowland forests, once believed to represent pristine ecologies only marginally impacted by human activity, are now understood to reflect millennia of human...
Preliminary Data for Developing a Fine-Scale Model of Socioecological Change on Ossabaw Island, Georgia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research project examines the history of human-environment interaction on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Archaeological collections for Woodland (ca. 1000 BC–AD 1000) and Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000–1700) occupations of the island are combined with environmental data synthesized from the analysis of sediment cores taken from five freshwater ponds on...
Preliminary Investigations at Raiatea, Society Islands, French Polynesia (2017)
The Society Islands are of primary importance for understanding human impacts on island ecologies and the dispersal of pre-contact voyaging populations in East Polynesia. Raiatea, the largest island of the Leeward Group, is recognized through Polynesian oral traditions as a locus of regional interaction and a departure point for migrations that colonized the distant islands of Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the second millennium AD. Here we present results from our first season of...