historical ecology (Other Keyword)
176-200 (1,058 Records)
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...
The Pristine Myth and Its Consequences for Amazonian Forest Peoples: An Example From the Upper Iriri (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. Located in the Xingu-Tapajós interfluve, the Terra do Meio is currently made up of a mosaic of protected areas and Indigenous reserves. This case study considers the relationship between the riverine traditional communities (who call themselves *beiradeiros) of the upper Iriri River and...
Pueblo Firescapes in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico (2025)
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. <html> Over the past three decades the size and intensity of wildfires has increased markedly in the western United States. While this increase in extreme fire behavior has been fueled by climate change, it can also be traced to human decisions made throughout the 20<sup>th</sup> century regarding the...
The Puruwá Border: Archaeological Footprints and Ancestorship in Tungurahua and Chimborazo, Ecuador (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Who are the descendants of the ancient Puruwá? Archaeological settlements located in the central highlands of Ecuador, share certain features which researchers used to interpret as the materiality of ethnohistoric Puruwá. Human figures and heads manufactured in ceramics with...
Pyric Herbivory in Ancient North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire is a powerful tool for hunting because fire effects have important consequences on habitat and forage for prey species. Using case studies from the northern Great Plains and the Southwest US, I explore how fire-use positively impacted prey abundances or location, resulting in higher encounter rates for particular hunting strategies. Specifically, these case...
Ready, aim, fire: darts, arrows, and pre-contact era fire use in the western Cascades (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Oregon, Indigenous oral histories and ethnohistories document the use of fire as an important part of the Indigenous subsistence system. Fire was used for plant tending, harvesting, and collecting, but also in hunting. Transitions in hunting technologies are often associated with significant changes in entire subsistence systems. For instance, the...
Reconstructing Fish Harvesting across Three Centuries in the Chesapeake Bay Area (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevant historical and documentary sources demonstrate the significance that seafood plays in the lives of people from the Chesapeake Bay area, both as an economic industry and as shaping culinary identity. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed is North America's largest estuary, occupied by a wide variety of aquatic and non-aquatic fauna. Even with this...
Reconstructing Land-Use and Socio-environmental Change at Epiclassic Chicoloapan Using Plant Macroremain Analyses (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Chicoloapan Viejo represents a long-term occupation that spanned multiple cultural phases, each associated with changes in population size, settlement pattern, and sociopolitical organization. These changes were also accompanied by climatic fluctuations of varying intensity. This...
A Regional Perspective on Shell Fishing, Shifting Environments, and the Communities of the Georgia Coast (2025)
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. Mollusk geochemistry and paleobiology data from shell rings support an interpretation that villagers on the Georgia Coast during the Late Archaic developed complex institutions centered on sustainable shellfish harvesting practices. These institutions appear to have been long-term, lasting for hundreds...
Regional Settlement, Subsistence, and Environment after the Demise of Teotihuacan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Significant changes in sociopolitical and economic organization following the collapse of the Teotihuacan state between the sixth and seventh centuries CE are evident in settlement patterns as well as archaeological materials including ceramics and lithics. The potential magnitude of this event and subsequent ramifications within the valley...
The Relationship between Mound Building and Agroforestry at Late Archaic Earthwork Sites (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mound-building and food production are often treated as two distinct areas of study in the archaeology of the Indigenous southeastern United States. Accordingly, the results of decades of research remain siloed – monumentality, funerary practices, and social organization on one side; hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivation on the other. In this...
Remote Sensing of Anthropogenic Vegetation in Sierra Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico (2017)
Geospatial technologies, such as remote sensing and LIDAR, have enabled archaeologists to capture high-resolution information about landscapes and settlement patterns thus contextualizing sites through a wider landscape perspective. These tools have also facilitated the detection of otherwise "invisible" archaeological sites through image or spectral analyses and other visualization techniques. This paper examines the performance of vegetation indices for the detection of anthropogenic...
Revitalizing Indigenous Foodways: An archaeobotanical multidisciplinary approach to identifying Caçabí bread in precolonial Borikén (Puerto Rico) (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical enquiry on past foodways has been reinvigorated by analysing food lumps (charred multi-component plant aggregates). The characterization of food aggregates has provided archaeobotany with a means to answer Sherraat’s provocative statement that “people do not eat species, they ate meals” via recovering sensuous...
The Rise and Fall of the Forest Canopy: An Application of Compound-Specific Stable Isotopic Analysis to a Holocene Sequence of Soils as a Record of Human Impacts in Southern Belize (2018)
Derived from lipid-rich plant tissues (primarily leaf waxes), long chain n-alkanes are a durable organic biomarker whose relative abundance is used in paeloecological studies as a proxy marker of plant species composition, and as an indicator of biomass burning. Isotopic composition of individual n-alkane components preserves signals that reflect both hydroclimate and canopy height. These properties can be employed to examine spatially integrated signals of anthropogenic land clearance in lake...
Ritual Production, Commodity Production, and Cultivating Agricultural Heritage in Ravni Kotari, Croatia (2018)
Agricultural crops may be selected not only because they "work" from the perspective of agroecology, but also for their value in maintaining religious affiliation, historical memory, and community identity. Drawing on emerging archaeobotanical evidence from the Ravni Kotari region of southern Croatia, this paper discusses the challenges of understanding continuities of cultivation practices over multiple millennia in relation to changing political-economic contexts within which cultivation has...
Riverine Resource Subsistence in Early to Middle Woodland Saginaw Valley, Michigan: An Investigation of Site 20SA1427 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the terminal Early to late-Middle Woodland periods (500 BC – AD 500), Native groups living in the central Saginaw Valley of Michigan dramatically shifted subsistence strategies from a reliance on medium to large game, to a focus on aquatic resources. Regional sites illustrate this shift, though from the point of deposition in central domestic spaces,...
Satellite Remote Sensing of Archaeological Environmental Change in the Chicama Valley (2017)
As global ecological change becomes a pressing contemporary issue, it’s beneficial to also consider how long term land use histories have effected current ecologies. Using imagery from several multispectral remote sensing satellites and field verification of detected sites, I describe how legacies from archaeological occupations impact modern industrial sugarcane production in the Chicama valley. Occupation sites and agricultural systems, both extant and remnant, continue to influence sugarcane...
Saving the Story of Medieval Icelandic Fishery Development: Siglunes as a Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The combination of deep sea fishing and dried fish production, and its distribution to inland consumers, is a distinctive and largely Nordic contribution to European diet and economy of eventual global impact in the 14th -17th centuries. One of the main questions is how and when this...
Shifting Palaeoeconomies at the Rockshelter Site Madjedbebe, Australia (2018)
The East Alligator River Region has undergone considerable environmental change throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene, with changing sea levels dramatically altering the ecosystems of this region. Current archaeological models for this area indicate that people adapted their economic activities to successfully exploit these shifting environments. Throughout these changes molluscs have played an important role in the economic activities of these groups and often comprise large portions of the...
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