historical ecology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (1,017 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we compare historic Atlantic walrus commercial and subsistence exploitation in Svalbard (Norway) and Foxe Basin (Arctic Canada), respectively. Data are drawn from osteometric analysis of zooarchaeological surface remains at harvest locales (examined both in situ and in museum collections). In studying harvest strategies of the same species...
Domesticated Forests? Interpreting Agroforestry Practices from Diachronic Trends in Firewood Collection at the Classic Maya City of Naachtun (2018)
What can be drawn from anthracological data to infer long-term socio-environmental dynamics among ancient Mayas is a question that has received little attention. At Naachtun (Northern Peten, Guatemala), we studied charcoal remains from archaeological contexts in relation with pedological data to reconstruct forest resources and land management through time. Since the beginning of Naachtun's occupation at the end of the Preclassic period (≈ AD 150), domestic firewood economy seems to have been...
Ecological Baselines, Long-Term Population Histories, and the Zooarchaeological Record (2015)
The potential for zooarchaeological data to inform modern conservation issues is unquestioned by archaeologists; however, with a few notable exceptions, such an approach has been underutilized. Zooarchaeological data are uniquely positioned to provide a long-term view on the population history and variation in foraging ecology of a species. Such information is paramount to conservation efforts for threatened taxa, particularly in addressing what has been called by conservation ecologists the...
Ecological legacies of pre-Columbian raised fields and their implications for agroecosystems today (2015)
Some South American lowland environments bear impressive legacies of pre-Columbian agriculture: vestiges of raised fields that have persisted since their abandonment centuries or millennia ago. In an interdisciplinary approach, we aim at understanding how the construction and use of raised fields in the past influence the functioning of these ecosystems today. In a raised-field landscape in a seasonally flooded coastal savanna of French Guiana, we characterized the distribution of soil...
Ecology of Bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (2018)
Bringing the geologically historic record to bear on questions of ecosystem evolution is a goal emphasized in recent National Research Council reports. Within this context one species has become significant, the bison of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Recent expansion of the population, and its subsequent migration outside federal lands, has created concern among federal managers, local ranchers, and conservation groups. However, much of what is known about pre-management herds is based...
The Effects of the Colonial Introduction of European Domestic Fauna in Some Localities of Southern Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The introduction of European domestic fauna during the Spanish conquest represents a major change in the cultural use of animals, influencing both how they acquired and processed. Although this point has been recognized, in fact it has been poorly documented. This...
Expanding Archaeological Research in Mývatnssveit: Conservation, Politics, and Modernity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the Mývatn region of northern Iceland contributed the first regional-scale interdisciplinary archaeological program to Icelandic archaeology (e.g. Lucas 2009, McGovern et al. 2007). Until recently the regional project focused chiefly on the settlement period (beginning in the late 9th century)...
Expanding Historical Ecology from Interdisciplinary to Transdisciplinary Objectives (2016)
The approaches and perspectives of Historical Ecology are solidly grounded in interdisciplinary objectives. Wide-ranging projects, such as the one Carole Crumley initiated and has sustained in France, demonstrate the utility of integrating interdisciplinary objectives into research that seeks to understand long-term changes in a landscape. As the original set of archaeological objectives in Crumley’s project changed over time, Historical Ecology emerged as a robust conceptual framework that...
Exploring High-Elevation Social-Ecological Relationships through Two Pilot Field Seasons of the Central Cascades Alpine Land-Use and Fire History Project (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precontact archaeology in Washington State’s Central Cascades is not well studied due to the region’s remote location and perception as a marginal area separating cultural centers in the western and eastern portions of the state. Recent research in the adjacent North and South Cascades (i.e., North Cascades National Park and Mt. Rainier National Park) has...
Exploring Sustainability and the Realities of Plantation Agriculture at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past thirty years, landscape archaeology has been used to study Thomas Jefferson’s retreat home and plantation located in Bedford County, Virginia. A goal of this work has been to cultivate a deeper understanding of the individuals who lived and labored on Poplar Forest plantation as well as how their households...
Feral Fields of the Eastern Adriatic Coast (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On Mediterranean islands and coastal areas of southern Europe, extensive field systems of drystone walls, terraces, and clearance cairns are common landscape features that attest to generations of landscape modification for cultivation. Tracing the precise chronologies of these fields is perennially challenging....
Finding a “Living Archaeology” among Tropical Trees: The Potential of Multidisciplinary Dendroarchaeology (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. Tropical forests have often been synonymous with 'wilderness' in popular discourse. However, the last couple of decades of research in archaeological, palaeoecological and historical ecology have revealed that these ecosystems have actually been intensively managed by our species from at least 45,000 years ago. This necessitates...
Finding Greener Pastures: The local development of agro-pastoralism in the Ordos Region, North China (2017)
This paper integrated new archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological research in the Ordos region to provide new information on the timing, mechanisms, and process of development of agro-pastoralism in China. The paper includes a new synthesis of archaeobotanical, and zooarchaeological data to understand the nature and the beginnings of agro-pastoralism as early as the Late Neolithic period (2600-1900 B.C.）. Environmental factors constrained and shaped animal husbandry in the Ordos Region, an area...
Fleeced Landscapes: Colonial Herding Practices in Northern New Mexico (2018)
Investigating how the presence and use of herded domesticates shaped life and the landscape in the Rio Grande gorge, this paper draws on a particular case study to explore the interactions between the endemic and the introduced within colonial herding practices. One strand of analysis will involve zooarchaeological and taphonomic data from colonial domestic contexts—predominantly based upon excavated midden deposits from selected sites in the Embudo Valley. This will be coupled with a...
The Flowery Places of the Copan Maya and the Species They Used to Create Them (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clues to the creation of flower-laden spaces in ancient Maya temples, tombs, and palaces lie on the floors of the best-preserved of these structures. The Copan Acropolis has proved to be a particularly good site for the recovery of well-preserved pollen grains from flowers that adorned ritual...
Food for thought: Exploring the Cultural and Ecological Significance of Greater Antillean Fisheries (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Greater Antilles is an archipelago of islands in the Northern Caribbean (e.g., Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). These islands are host to a melting pot of unique cultural identities and ecological biodiversity. It is well known that the long-term harvest of marine fishes greatly shaped human cultures and marine...
Forest islands and raised fields in the 2nd millennium BCE Amazon (2015)
Pre-Columbian earthworks in the Llanos de Mojos show discrete spatial patterns, at different scales. For example, large mounds and causeways are found in the southeast, causeways and raised fields in the south, and large raised fields in the center and to the north. Recent excavations in forest islands associated with raised fields in Central Mojos identify occupations dating to the second millennium BCE. This raises the question of how to integrate different elements into histories of...
Forest Use at Te Zulay, an ancient community at the Mouth of The Pastaza River in the Upper Amazonia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of plants of ancient Amazonian societies is currently heavily debated. Much of such it concerns the difficulty of finding good paleobotanic evidence in archaeological contexts. Lately, old plant use strategies have been reconstructed mainly based on phytoliths, starch, and pollen evidence. However, the present study is focused on charred wood...
Forest, Frost, and Agriculture: Measuring Three Centuries of Environmental Change at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (2018)
This paper highlights ecological discoveries made during a survey of natural and cultural resources along a new 2.2 mile parkway at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. Poplar Forest is Thomas Jefferson’s former retreat home and plantation located in Bedford County, Virginia. In addition to locating archaeological sites and mapping aboveground features, 10 forest plots were established within stands of increasing age adjacent to the proposed path of the parkway. By measuring tree diameter,...
Forged Forests: Landscapes of Iron in Salisbury, Connecticut (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Between 1762 and 1847, Salisbury Connecticut was home to Riga Ironworks, one of forty nearby blast furnaces which processed iron ore for highly prized cannons and anchors, among other objects of an emerging United States militarism. During this time, the Riga furnace supported a thriving town’s economy and identity. Today, the...
Formation Processes, Fertility, Spatial Extent, and Carbon Content of Anthropogenic Soils in the Upper Xingu, Southern Amazon (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. Recent research in the Upper Xingu carried out in partnership with the indigenous Kuikuro community (Associação Indígena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu; AIKAX) has revealed that modified soils associated with archaeological remains and possibly with ancient cultivation areas may be much more...
From Cooking to Smelting, the Social Technology of Pyrotechnology of Earth Ovens (2018)
The effects of earth ovens on societies is a topic that has not been consider much, mainly because the limitation of archaeological findings. Because our research has been mainly concentrated in floodplains environments, we have been successful in recovering a large sample that allows to propose explanations on the variability of them, and the relationship that features have in understanding some basic aspects of the social characteristic of the societies that created them. As a study case, we...
From Neutral to Mutual: A Long-Term Perspective on Human-Rabbit Relationships in Highland Mexico (2018)
Studies of human-animal relationships provide insights into multiple issues relevant to archaeological research, including changes in human-environmental interactions, subsistence strategies, and socio-cultural dynamics. This presentation investigates the relationship between humans and rabbits (cottontails and jackrabbits), which were among the most commonly consumed animals in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Focusing primarily on the settlement of Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico during the...
Fruits from the Ancestors: Tsimshian Forest Gardens in the Pacific Northwest (2018)
The historical ecology of Dałk Gyilakyaw, the ancestral village of the Gitsm’geelm Tsimshian, is a community-based research program that focuses on connecting the past to the present using a heterarchy of ethnographic, ethnobiological, and archaeological methods that are organized from Tsimshian Adawx, worldviews, and community objectives. Traditional resource management and environmental wisdom are explored as a means of investigating the archaeological past in less invasive ways. In this...
Herder land use and nutrient hotspots in southern Kenya: geochemical analysis of anthropogenic soil enrichment. (2017)
Mobile herding societies are often considered to leave behind few traces in the archaeological record, however pastoral settlements may have helped shape the broader landscape. Herders relying on domesticated cattle, sheep and goat arrived in the most productive grasslands of East Africa >3600 calBP years ago. Our collaborative research investigates the legacies of their land-use through geoarchaeological analyses. We present results of analyses of five Pastoral Neolithic era archaeological...