historical ecology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (989 Records)
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...
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, 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...
High-Elevation Bison in the Rocky Mountain Front Range during the Late Holocene (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late Holocene, large bison herds occurred in grass-dominated ecological zones across much of the North American mid-continent. However, in situ fossils and historic accounts illustrate the adaptability of bison to a broad ecological niche space, from grassy prairies and plains to eastern forests. Yet,...
Historic Native American Impacts on a Temperate Forested Ecosystem, Northeastern U.S.A. (2016)
We quantified the nature and extent of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) disturbance on the forests of the Finger Lakes region, west-central New York, U.S.A., through multivariate statistical analysis of witness trees and survey line vegetation descriptions derived from original late 18th century CE land survey records and historical documentation in conjunction with archaeological site distributions analyzed in a geographic information system (GIS). Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) ordinated the...
Historical Ecologies of Botanical Gardens: Archaeobotany at Bartram’s Garden (Philadelphia, PA) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collection and transport of natural specimens during the long eighteenth century had political, intellectual, and ecological effects. Botanical gardens are key loci to examine the material histories of these processes. Bartram’s Garden, the most prominent botanical garden in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,...
Historical Ecology and Archaeology on the Galápagos Islands (2015)
The poster introduces an interdisciplinary project recently initiated on San Cristóbal Island, the easternmost island of the Galápagos archipelago. Initially focusing on the 19th century plantation of Manuel J. Cobos, the project explores the nature and temporal depths of human involvement in ecological transformation, as novel or ‘emerging’ ecosystems, defined by their novelty, cultural origin, and subsequent endurance in the absence of humans, were developed within the context of what was to...
Historical Ecology and Archaeometallurgy on the 5th and 6th century Osaka Plain (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Extensive excavation records and legacy materials provide ample opportunities for novel research in Japan. This project seeks to open and demonstrate new avenues of inquiry using legacy data and previously excavated materials related to well-studied topics by linking environmental change to the...
Historical Ecology and Planning for the Future: Mapping the Historical Trajectory of American Agriculture (2016)
Carole L. Crumley has long advocated broadly inclusive studies that reach across disciplines to bring together social and environmental data from multiple geographic and temporal scales in order to draw lessons from the past. This work reports the use of those approaches to map the changes in colonial American agriculture and on-going research into 19th century westward expansion. What is becoming clear is that U.S. has a long-term trajectory which continues to move away from the sustaining...
Historical Ecology in the Cold and Wet: Carole Crumley’s North Atlantic Legacy (2016)
In 1990 Carole Crumley organized a School of American Research (SAR) seminar that brought together a group of researchers from different areas with interests in a wide range of periods and topics in world archaeology and human ecology. This disparate group was united by Carole’s vision of a fresh approach to the interactions of environment and society through time- something beyond the increasingly stale processual/ post-processual debates of that period. Her vision of a dynamic interaction of...
Historical Ecology of Demographic and Economic Change in the Highlands of Western Kenya: Archaeobotanical and Mycological Evidence (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last several millennia of cultural history in the western Kenyan highlands have been marked both by punctuated periods of considerable demographic and economic change, and by continuous in-situ processes of genetic, linguistic, and economic interaction and admixture. Historical linguistic and archaeological models of the peopling of this region have, among...
The Historical Ecology of Dolphins and Porpoises off the Oregon and Pacific Northwest Coasts: Contributions from Zooarchaeology (2018)
Wide-scale excavations were undertaken in the middens at Seaside, Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s. However, due to the overwhelming amount of faunal material, much of it remains unanalyzed. This project focuses on the material from the Par-Tee midden (35CLT20). The only cetaceans analyzed from this midden are whales, leaving a knowledge gap about prehistoric human interaction with smaller cetaceans, such as dolphins and porpoises. Using the cetacean comparative and reference collection at the...
Historical ecology of landscape transformations and ceramic industries at the site of Cedro (Lower Tapajós) from pre-colonial to colonial times. (2016)
The presence of demographically dense indigenous societies in the Lower Tapajós River during AD 900-1600 is visible in the present day’s landscape through the existence of Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE), earthworks, and a distinctive ceramic industry. As demonstrated by recent archaeological surveys, landscape transformations and ceramic assemblages associated to the Tapajó chiefdom are widespread at the regional scale and attest to common cultural practices. Although these archaeological sites are...
The Historical Ecology of Laxgalts'ap – a Cultural Keystone Place of the Gitga’ata of Northern British Columbia (2017)
For many Indigenous Peoples, their traditional lands are archives of their histories, from the deepest of time to recent memories and actions. These histories are written in the landscapes’ geological features, the plant and animal communities, and associated archaeological and paleoecological records. Some of these landscapes, recently termed "Cultural Keystone Places" (CKPs), are iconic for these groups and have become symbols of the connections between the past and the future, and between...
The Historical Ecology of the Postclassic Itza Maya in Lake Petén Itzá (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petén lakes region, Guatemala, has a rich and diverse ecology and abundant locally available resources including terrestrial, amphibious, and aquatic animals. The Postclassic (1100–1525 CE) sites in this region are mainly located on the lakeshore, suggesting that the Postclassic people were attracted to the lakeshore...
Historical Ecology: An Approach to the Investigation of Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions in the Horn of Africa (2017)
Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...
Historical Ecology: Archaeology for a Sustainable Future (2016)
Historical Ecology is a research program that seeks to integrate diverse perspectives from human and natural sciences to improve our understanding on the relations between societies and their changing landscapes. Investigations in historical ecology draw from different corpus of data, including the participation of the public, not only to solve scientific problems, but also to provide answers to social and political situations. Archaeology has a major role in the production of knowledge on the...