historical ecology (Other Keyword)
26-50 (1,058 Records)
Historical ecology has become one of the most relevant research paradigms in understanding the long-term relationships between humans and their environments. Its multidisciplinary approach dissolves the boundaries between the social and natural sciences to bring together disciplines such as archaeology, ecology, biology, anthropology, ethnohistory, and geography toward the conservation and restoration of natural and cultural heritage. This paper specifically explores archaeology’s unique...
Avifaunal Remains from the Palmrose Site (35CT47): Establishing Seasonality and Investigating Endangered Species (2018)
Avifaunal remains have great potential to improve archaeological understanding of the economy and subsistence of peoples who lived in the past, as well as to yield information about local ecology, environmental change, and past bird species distribution. The large assemblage of faunal remains from the three archaeological sites comprising the Seaside Collection from Seaside, OR, contains significant quantities of bird bone. Previous analyses of vertebrate remains (including birds) by Greenspan...
Beekeeping in the Yucatán Hacienda: The Role of the Melipona beecheii in the Nineteenth-Century Rural Landscape from an Environmental History Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii in nineteenth-century Yucatán and shows how the rise of the hacienda system played a contingent role in reshaping beekeeping practices and human-bee relationships. Using primary sources such as beekeeping manuals and...
Beyond the Fields: Lenape Domesticated Landscapes in the Minisink National Historic Landmark (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions of Indigenous agricultural systems in the Northeastern United States have focused almost exclusively on the cultivation of maize, beans, and squash. General models focus on the cultivation of these plants in ridged fields or fields of small hillocks. While the fields and crops grown within them are important, I argue they are only one part of a...
Bronze and Iron Age Urban Ecology in the Galilee (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromammal remains have proven to be successful proxies for conducting zooarchaeological research and reconstructing paleoenvironmental conditions in the Levant. Their success as a palaeoecological proxy is due to their sensitivity to climatic change, specific ecological niche, and low rate of human interaction. While there is abundant research on...
Building an Archaeological Record of Over Three Centuries of Turtle Use Across the Chesapeake Bay Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and historical data speak to the importance of turtles in the Chesapeake Bay region, which includes the eastern portions of Maryland and Virginia and which serves as a home to nearly 20 species of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine turtles. Despite the many roles that turtles played in pre- and post-contact communities in the area, there...
California’s Channel Islands as a Model System for Understanding the Historical Ecology of Islands (2016)
Islands around the world have served as important model systems for understanding a host of cultural and environmental issues. Here we synthesize our long-term research program on the historical ecology and archaeology of California’s Channel Islands. Drawing on zooarchaeological, paleoethnobotanical, genetic, stable isotope, and other datasets we document a 13,000 year sequence of human environmental interactions from coastal foragers to early historical ranchers and modern conservationists....
Caribbean Landscapes in the Age of the Anthropocene: The First Colonizers (2016)
Identifying first human colonization of new places is challenging, especially when groups were small and material traces of their occupations were ephemeral. Generating reliable reconstructions of human-colonization patterns from intact archaeological sites may be exceedingly difficult given post-depositional taphonomic processes and in cases of island and coastal locations the inundation of landscapes resulting from post-Pleistocene sea-level rise. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction is a better...
The Centrality of Saplings: Trees and Archaeoecological Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often when we examine past ecologies we focus on food webs--what people ate, and how people were connected to larger trophic entanglements. However, by analyzing the networks that form around the myriad uses beyond food of other biota we can see how humans embed themselves in and structure ecologies worldwide. As part of the...
Changes in Resource Use during the Mississippian Period on St. Catherines Island, Georgia (2018)
After more than forty years of zooarchaeological research on prehispanic collections from coastal Georgia, it is clear that people exploited the same suite of estuarine resources from the Late Archaic through the Mississippian periods, despite changing socio-political conditions. However, changes in resource use over time are evident when fine-grained recovery and multiple analytical techniques are applied to vertebrate and invertebrate collections from the Mississippian period on St. Catherines...
Chocolate, Manioc, and Maize: Kante’t’u’ul and Chachaklu’um in Motul de San José’s Realm (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2013 and 2015, the Periphery of Motul de San José Archaeological Project conducted fieldwork at two subsidiary sites, Kante’t’u’ul and Chachaklu’um, located within 5 km of Motul de San José, the primary Late Classic center in this zone along the northern shore of Lake Peten Itza. Paleoethnobotanical and chemical residue analyses have highlighted...
A Chronological Multisite Analysis of Shellfish Gathering Strategies in the King Range National Conservation Area, Northwest California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The King Range National Conservation Area (KRNCA), located in southern Humboldt County, California, has been of particular interest to archaeologists since the 1970s. Early archaeological investigations in the KRNCA were crucial for developing regional North Coast chronologies and have yielded some of the oldest coastal sites north of San Francisco Bay....
Circum-Atlantic Responses to the Late Antique Little Ice Age (536-660 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of North Atlantic cultures around the margins of the Bermuda Azores Subtropical High offer opportunities to observe parallel impacts on cultures on both sides of an ocean on four continents (Americas, Eurasia, Africa) as changes in global average temperatures influence the size and position of the High. Of special interest is the influence of the...
Clarifying Coral Harvesting for Historical Swahili Monuments (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Swahili architecture is well known for its grand structures, often constructed using carved, live-harvested coral. Research has been sparse on the practices of coral harvesting despite coral’s importance for the medieval Swahili and for reef ecosystems. To clarify the potential impacts of coral harvesting, the authors collected survey data on the amount...
Climate Change and Local Socio-Ecological Systems in the Past along the Georgia Coast, USA (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. Modelling expected environmental conditions derived from past global climatic trends presents an issue of scale when linking the historical trajectory of past societies to climatic change. Global climate change influences local environmental conditions at scales critical to the contextualization of...
A Coastal Landscape of Change: Late Holocene Sea-Level Fluctuations and Estuarine Resource Availability during the Early Woodland Period at the Creighton Island Shell Ring Site (9MC87), Georgia, U.S.A. (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. Creighton Island shell ring (9MC87) is a crescent-shaped shell midden, approximately 40 m in diameter, that was constructed by Native Americans participating in multi-seasonal, cooperative and sustainable shell-fish mass capture and fishing techniques during the Late Archaic period (3000–1000 B.C.)....
Coastal Southeast Queensland, Australia: An Historical Ecology Model of Mid- to Late Holocene Settlement and Subsistence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coastal Southeast Queensland covers an area stretching from Fraser Island in the north to the border of northern New South Wales in the south, and possesses the best documented and most intensively scrutinized coastal archaeological record in Australia. The area was a major focus in the late 1970s when...
Collagen Fingerprinting (ZooMS) and Caribbean Archaeological Fish Assemblages: Methodological Implications for Historical Fisheries Baselines and Conservation Applications (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Caribbean Sea is the most species-rich sea bordering the Atlantic. However, its high biodiversity and endemism face unprecedented anthropogenic threats. Although zooarchaeological data broadly indicate regionally variable Indigenous human impacts on fisheries in the past, elucidating outcomes of human impacts beyond class (e.g., Actinopterygii) is...
Colonization of Paradise: Historical Ecology and Archaeology of El Progreso Plantation, Galápagos (1870–1904) (2017)
Colonization of the Galápagos Islands started soon after Ecuadorian separation from the Gran Colombia in 1830. During this decade the Islands were legally claimed by the Republic of Ecuador and colonization projects started. Exploiting concessions were approved to national and international companies. One of these concessions was assigned to Ecuadorian businessmen Manuel J. Cobos and José Monroy to create an agricultural colony on San Cristóbal Island; 1000 km west from the Ecuadorian coast in...
Common Pool Resourses, Collective Actions, and Landscapes: A Cross-Cultural Evaluation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human modification of the environment with the goal of increasing productivity, variously referred to as landscape transformation, niche construction, environmental engineering, etc., has been recognized and studied...
The Contested Mosaic: Landscape and Livelihood in the Lacandon Rainforest (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I explore the complex regional agroecological history of interaction of global and local social and biophysical forces that shape the landscape of an important tropical forest region of Mexico. This...
Continuity and Change on the Gobi Frontier: Geoarchaeology of Human Adaptations to Desertification in Southern Mongolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Northgrippian climatic stage of the mid-Holocene epoch in East Asia was marked by a period of pronounced warm/moist climatic conditions. This had a profound impact on the hydrology and vegetation in the northernmost region of the Gobi Desert located in southern Mongolia. Our geoarchaeological and archaeological...
Cooperation and Coercion: Geography, Ecology, Climate, and Surplus Production in the Rise of the Calusa Kingdom (2018)
The Calusa of southwest Florida were the most complex and powerful society in Florida during the sixteenth century AD. They relied for protein not on agriculture, but on aquatic resources harvested from shallow-water estuaries. Our interdisciplinary team is exploring the evidence for surplus production and intensification against a background of environmental challenges and opportunities. We focus on Mound Key and Pineland, the two largest Calusa towns. We think that cooperative heterarchical...
Crumbling Infrastructure: Archaeological Perspectives (2018)
Recently, the term "infrastructure" has gained a remarkable degree of traction in both academic and political discourses. Politicians, from the left and right, bemoan what they term "crumbling infrastructure," offering fixes by way of material and technological improvements to roads, waterways, cities, and energy grids. Scholars draw on and expand posthumanist theories to analyze and expose how infrastructure does not just passively support social aims, but actively shapes (and subverts) human...
Cultural Footprints Unearthed: Exploring Settlement Patterns and the Constructed Landscape of Yalahau, Yucatan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discourse surrounding the environmental impact of humans on Earth underscores the imperative to comprehensively grasp the temporal and geographical dimensions, as well as the transformative intensity of anthropogenic changes. The Parque Estatal de Yalahau Project, a multidisciplinary endeavor encompassing archaeology, paleoecology, and historical...