historical ecology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Carolyn Freiwald.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petén lakes region, Guatemala, has a rich and diverse ecology and abundant locally available resources including terrestrial, amphibious, and aquatic animals. The Postclassic (1100–1525 CE) sites in this region are mainly located on the lakeshore, suggesting that the Postclassic people were attracted to the lakeshore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Catherine D'Andrea. Valery Terwilliger.

Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denise Schaan.

Historical Ecology is a research program that seeks to integrate diverse perspectives from human and natural sciences to improve our understanding on the relations between societies and their changing landscapes. Investigations in historical ecology draw from different corpus of data, including the participation of the public, not only to solve scientific problems, but also to provide answers to social and political situations. Archaeology has a major role in the production of knowledge on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Szpak. Christyann Darwent. John Darwent.

This study presents stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions for zooarchaeological specimens from three sites in Inglefield Land (northwestern Greenland) representing approximately the last 1,000 years. Isotopic compositions for planktivorous seabirds (little auks, Alle alle) reveal general stability in biogeochemical cycling at the base of the food web since the end of the Medieval Warm Period. On the other hand, marine mammals (ringed seal, bearded seal, walrus) exhibit variable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renato Kipnis. Solange B. Caldarelli. Letícia M. Muller. Andrey M. Castro. Aguinaldo J. M. Castro.

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. In order to understand the processes that generated the rich, complex, and diverse cultural and environmental history present in Amazonia, and specifically along the Xingu River basin, it is crucial that we generate information on when, where, and how small-scale foraging societies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Henshaw.

This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interwoven pathways of culture and environment are key to the interpretation of the past. Ancient peoples navigated the complexities of environmental changes through strategic decisions and the management of local landscapes. This dynamic holds true for the Chesapeake region where historically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chad Yost.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An important maize kernel processing method is nixtamalization, which involves boiling kernels in alkaline water to soften the kernels and remove the hulls. Researchers investigating maize processing, cooking, and consumption often look for microscopic plant remains called phytoliths. Because phytoliths are susceptible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Boucher.

This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late-Mid Holocene the southeast was impacted by dramatic changes in climate causing what appears to be a large shift in past people’s interaction with the landscape seen through a regionwide restructuring of settlement patterns and the abandonment of significant places. Noting these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Allen.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of Pacific paleoenvironments, how they changed with human arrival, and further transformations in the post-settlement period owes much to the research and insights of Steve Athens. This paper considers palaeoenvironmental records from central East Polynesian islands in relation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Thompson. John Turck.

This paper synthesizes and evaluates settlement and subsistence patterns in relation to landscape change for the entire prehistoric period on the Georgia coast. The dynamic coastal processes of the region have altered the topography and distribution of resources, including those important to humans. These processes were neither uniform in space nor time, with variations leading to the creation of micro-habitats. We assess these habitats individually and as part of a complex whole, to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan LeBlanc.

This presentation addresses the hydrology of agricultural terraces and a spring associated with the Late Intermediate Period (post AD 1200) site of Las Peñas located in the Moquegua Valley of Peru. Positioned 150 meters northwest of Las Peñas, the spring is located at roughly 2,700 meters in elevation and sits at the base of several agricultural terraces. This field system was presumably in production at the time Las Peñas was occupied and is still in use today. Using coring techniques, sediment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gibbons.

In the early settlement of Iceland, Scandinavian pioneers brought their social knowledge alongside herds of livestock to the untamed island and in turn initiated a millennium-long tradition of livestock husbandry and survivorship in a harsh and unpredictable environment. Decades of integrated historical ecological research across Iceland allows for an exploration of the complex human ecodynamics of this marginal European outpost in the North Atlantic. Comparative osteometrical data from multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tres Zapotes, the largest epi-Olmec site in southern Veracruz, Mexico, has an occupation history spanning 2,000 years from the Early Formative (1500 BCE) to the Classic (300 CE) periods and saw the emergence of political complexity, agricultural economies, and monumental construction in the region (Pool and Loughlin 2017; Pool...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Watling. Morgab Schmidt.

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. This paper presents the preliminary hypotheses of a soil sampling programme aimed at mapping precolumbian and historic vegetation dynamics in the Xingu Indigenous Territory (TIX), Brazil. Research carried out with the Kuikuro during the last three decades has resulted in the archaeology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Elise Mooney.

This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval literary sources describe the Icelandic landscape when the first settlers arrived as ‘forested from the mountains to the shores’. It had previously been thought that the island was rapidly deforested after settlement, but recent research gives a much more nuanced picture of woodland history. It...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josefina Vasquez Pazmino.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Inka Empire began its process of conquest and colonialism in 1420 in ancient Ecuador. The inkas reproduced their own social spaces for the public, the sacred, and the economic over local spaces. However, such Inka layers of transformation were suddenly truncated by the Spanish arrival at around 1530, which again brought different kinds of populations that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Bryan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Kafue River Floodplain is a critical freshwater resource in Zambia for local fisheries and communities. The Bantu-Mobility Project has worked on archaeological sites in this region that chronicle the settlement and movement of the Bantu-speaking communities and their trade routes during the 6th to 16th centuries. Our contribution to this project is to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Plekhov.

While New England is today a mostly forested landscape, up to 80% of this region was deforested during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for agricultural land-use. As the rural economy of New England shifted to a more urban and industrial one, much of this agricultural land was abandoned and subsequently reforested. The vestiges of this once rural landscape can now best be seen in LiDAR imagery, in which features such as stonewalls are particularly well discernible. Though the spatial and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Royle. Eric Guiry. Trevor Orchard. Dongya Yang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lake Ontario once supported large populations of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush). However, by the mid-19th century populations of these salmonid species had collapsed as a result of overharvesting and habitat alteration by European settlers. Prior to this collapse, it has been hypothesized Indigenous peoples were able to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Guiry. Suzanne Needs-Howarth. Paul Szpak. Michale Richards.

Isotopic analyses of archaeological faunal remains can add significant temporal depth to modern and historical baseline data, which play an important role in understanding present and future environmental change. In this paper, we use stable nitrogen isotope analyses of archaeological (A.D. 1000-1900) bone collagen of pelagic predators, such as lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) and whitefishes (Coregonus sp.), as a proxy measure for environmental changes in Lake Ontario over time. Results show...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Lyons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Based on pollen data from Ozegahara, archaeologists have long understood Japan’s protohistoric Kofun period as colder and wetter than the previous Yayoi period and subsequent Asuka and Nara historic periods. Though it is not yet widely incorporated into synthetic research on the period, recent higher resolution data is beginning to overturn this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Junko Habu.

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. This presentation argues that the resilience of the food systems during and after the Jomon period (ca. 16,000–2500 cal BP) in prehistoric Japan must have been closely related to the diversity of staple foods, settlement locations, and methods of landscape management including the use of fire. Despite an abundance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayleen Ottman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Exploring a collaborative approach to land and resource management, this presentation showcases a distinctive and ongoing project at Fishers Peak State Park (the Park), one of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s (CPW) newest state parks. In 2019, the Park, assisted by ERO Resources Corporation (ERO), initiated voluntary tribal engagement with tribal nations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Morales. Lauren M. Mirasol. Amira F. Ainis. René L. Vellanoweth.

Land snails have the potential to address a variety of archaeological concerns, including the identification of paleolandscapes and paleoclimatic conditions. Such studies demonstrate how non-marine mollusks can be employed to infer changes such as seasonal and long-term precipitation rates and anthropogenic landscape alterations. Although land snails are abundant in Channel Island sites, they are often ignored. In this paper, we utilize land snail remains from three archaeological sites on San...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Yao.

This paper complements prevailing studies on prehistoric domestication and agriculture with an eye toward the interrelated problem of land use and food security in south China. In ecologies characterized by monsoonal variability, rugged terrain, and dense vegetation, what are the conditions that challenge or enable the cultivation of a range of staples? Using archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data, I examine how extensification of field practices enabled the cultivation of...