historical ecology (Other Keyword)
26-50 (1,017 Records)
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...
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...
Deciphering Ornamental Landscapes at Monticello (2016)
Pollen data can serve as valuable evidence to advance our understanding of change and spatial variation in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello from its initial European settlement in the 18th century to the present. The data presented in this paper draws from a multi-year campaign of stratigraphic sampling conducted in the largely ornamental mountaintop landscape immediately surrounding Jefferson's mansion. Comparing these data to stratigraphic samples collected away from the...
Defining Marginality Under Shifting Baselines: Historical Transformations of California’s Channel Island Ecosystems (2015)
Spanish arrival to California’s Channel Islands in AD 1542 marked the beginning of widespread ecological changes for island land and seascapes. Over the next several centuries, the Chumash and Tongva were removed to mainland towns and missions, sea otters were extirpated from local waters, commercial fisheries and ranching operations developed, and a variety of new domesticated plants and animals were introduced. The ecological fallout was both swift and extensive, resulting in new terrestrial...
Defining the Anthropocene on California's Northern Channel Islands (2017)
California's Northern Channel Islands provide some of the most detailed and well-preserved records of human occupation of dynamic island landscapes in the world. Here, archaeological and historical ecological research over the past 20 years has produced a variety of data about human eco-dynamics in both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, spanning nearly 13,000 years. We summarize current knowledge of cultural and ecological changes from Paleoindian to historic times, focusing on what...
Dialectic in Historical Ecology (2016)
It has been my privilege to call Carole Crumley a friend for 44 years. Our experiences working together in Burgundy, France in the 1970s and 1980s were formative to my research perspective in historical ecology, a perspective to which Carole herself has been a major contributor. Historical ecology is the multiscalar and multitemporal study of the dynamic relations between people and their environment. But “environment” is more than the sum total of one’s physical surroundings. As perceived by...
Different and complementary landscapes: A case of study in the Flona-Tapajós (2016)
The goal of this presentation is to contribute to the ongoing debate in Amazonian studies to which human societies impacted and reshaped the landscapes. Landscapes are the results of a human action and environmental changes over time, providing a fundamental dataset for understanding social practices in a historically particular manner (Ingold 1993). Ultimately, this presentation sheds light on the formation and significance of settlement patterns within sites located in the Flona-Tapajós and...
Digging Deep: Place-based Variation in Māʻohi Agricultural Production Systems across the Late Pre-Contact Society Islands, French Polynesia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the socio-ecological contexts of past agricultural systems in complex societies requires expansive datasets, particularly when the goal is to mesh top-down and bottom-up perspectives that generate data at different scales of analysis. Here, we bring together ethnohistoric and...
Digital Archaeology and Virtual Reality Models of the Penal Colonies in the Galápagos Islands (1860–1959) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have been used by societies around the world to abandon, exile, or relocate those deemed unworthy. Repressive institutions, as a form of state infrastructure, have been created on the islands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to detain political prisoners,...