historical ecology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (1,058 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advocacy for holistic approaches to managing major community and economic development, coupled with global trends in heritage conservation policy, have brought cultural landscapes into focus as manifestations of co-developed human and ecological systems. International and United States policies support the conservation of cultural landscapes in...
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,...
Diverging Harvesting Strategies of Atlantic Walruses: An Intercontinental Comparison (2023)
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...
Dryland Foraging and Resilience in the Archaic Period at San Esteban Rockshelter, SW Texas: Phytolith Perspectives (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. Recent excavations at San Esteban Rockshelter in the Chihuahuan Desert of SW Texas have revealed a long history of occupation beginning early in the Paleoindigenous period through Early and Late Archaic periods. This deep-time sequence offers the possibility of tracking human plant foraging practices from the Late Pleistocene...
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 Effect of Postdepositional Fragmentation on Archaeological Oyster Shell Metrics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is an ecological and cultural keystone species that has been exploited by humans for millennia. Oyster size is a good proxy for population health, and researchers frequently use valve height and length measurements from archaeological and paleontological contexts that provide baselines for assessing past human...
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 Early Pottery Function, Foodways, and Land-Use Change in the Middle Savannah River Valley: Results of Organic Residue Analysis (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. In this paper, we consider the functions of Late Archaic pottery vessels from the Middle Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina to identify patterns of differential use between mobile and increasingly settled groups. To directly determine the function of these early cooking pots, organic...
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...