Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
1-25 (353 Records)
Geospatial analysts are now capable of developing increasingly accurate models of past and future ‘shorelines’ and the predicted impacts they might have on archaeological sites or cultural landscapes. But GIS alone cannot realistically simulate hydrodynamic effects, terrain displacements, or changes in vegetation communities, water bodies, and atmospheres. Funded by the NCPTT, this study combines GIS analysis of LiDAR terrain and bathymetric models with the photorealistic 3D modeling...
2017 Excavations at McDonald Creek (FAI-2043), A Multicomponent, Open-Air Site in the Tanana Flats Training Area, Fort Wainwright, Central Alaska (2018)
In 2013 our team began a 3-year testing project to assess the research potential of the recently-discovered McDonald Creek archaeological site (FAI-2043). The site is located in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska south of Fairbanks. Site testing indicated a well-stratified and reasonably preserved multicomponent site situated in unconsolidated eolian sand and silt deposits atop an ancient alluvial landform. Three cultural components have been identified so far, dating to the early Allerød,...
A 5,000-Year History of Landscape Evolution in the Rio Blanco Valley of Uxbenká, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic people and Classic Period Maya played important roles in shaping their environments. Through early deforestation and later agricultural erosion humans have modified the world they lived in. This study aims to show the role the Maya had in the environmental change in their region. We report results of analysis of a 5,500-year-long profiles soil from...
6k Years of Land Use in South Asia: Sustainability, Power Relations, and Tropical Variability (2018)
Tropical environments vary significantly in terms of rainfall and seasonality; these differences make a difference in the kinds of land use strategies that work over the long term. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and constraints of tropical environments in South Asia, considering the range of land use practices deployed over the last 6,000 years in this region. I argue that some practices which could be called sustainable also come at a high cost in terms of human dignity,...
Activity Area Analysis of the Sanders Site (45KT315), 3–4 Kya Yakima Uplands, Washington (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LaPlante recently led a new study of the Sanders Site (45KT315) collection. Excavated in the 1970s, the site is located within the Yakima Uplands of the Middle Columbia River. This is the sixth thesis or research scholarship study of Dr. William Smith’s legacy collection, and one of two dozen similar student projects focused on four CWU collections from...
Adaptive Pastoralism and Climate Change in the Irish Chalcolithic – Early Bronze Age: Adding Evidence from Termon, Co. Clare (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Burren, a karstic region located in Western Ireland, has seen intensive farming practices since the Neolithic. Local proxies throughout the west coast of Ireland have indicated periods where the environment shifted to colder and wetter conditions in two key phases during the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC. A comparison of the archaeological record at...
The Adoption of Agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico: Stable Isotope Data for 10,000 Years of Environmental and Dietary Change (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An enduring focus in anthropological research concerns the causes for adoption of agriculture in multiple regions across the globe near the onset of the Holocene. The Tehuacan Valley of Puebla, Mexico, represents a unique location to explore long-term trends of human-plant coevolution as the dry climate of the valley...
Aerial Mapping Approaches for Long-Term Monitoring of Heritage Landscapes Impacted by Climate Change (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a strong need to document heritage landscapes impacted due to rapidly changing climates in Canada. This paper presents two case studies about using UAV-based technology to better understand landscapes impacted by climate change. Both examples use UAV photogrammetric methods to monitor large and complex archaeological heritage sites. The first case...
The African Humid Period: Paleolimnological and Paleoecological Evidence (2018)
From about 15,000 to 5,000 years ago, lakes and rivers existed across now arid areas of northern Africa, accompanied by extended ranges of vegetation, animals and human settlement. In eastern Africa, lake levels were very much higher than present, with now-closed lakes overflowing into the Nile and tributary rivers. While it is widely recognised that this African Humid Period resulted from an intensified African summer monsoon linked to the early Holocene precessional increase in summer...
The Agency of Monsoons in South Asia (2018)
Every June through September, the inhabitants of South Asia welcome and celebrate the southwest monsoons. The monsoon winds are the lifeline of this region but also a major threat, inspiring societies to devise mechanisms to both harness their potential and subvert the damage they may cause. This paper analyzes prehistoric and historical responses to monsoons in South Asia in terms of their unpredictable nature, and examines how the monsoons both facilitate and constrict people’s actions. In...
An Agent-Based Disaster Model: Marginality, Decision-Making, and Novel Resource Exploitation during ENSO Flooding Events in Chicama, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecological disasters are often argued to be forces of large-scale societal change, including the primary causes of major cultural collapses. This concept is reevaluated in light of the recent 2016-2017 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which this event affects the landscape. Through integration of remote...
Agricultural Niche Construction in Roman North Africa: Simulating Irrigation and Deforestation on a Desert Margin (2018)
Earth system models are climate models capable of simulating land-atmosphere feedbacks and the complex biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes that drive them. These models are particularly well-suited to studying the impact of preindustrial land use on regional climate change, as they explicitly resolve the impacts of irrigation, deforestation, and agropastoral production on the flow of water and energy between the land and atmosphere. Generating realistic maps of past land use is a...
Analysis of Plant Remains from Aventura, an Ancient Maya Site in Northern Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of botanical remains recovered from archaeological contexts at the Aventura site, located in what is now northern Belize. A total of 478 large carbonized plant fragments, 167 flotation samples, and 10 eDNA samples were included in this analysis. Samples were recovered from a...
Ancient Landscapes of the Rocky Mountain Front: A View from the Billy Big Springs Site, MT (2018)
The northern Rocky Mountain Front contains critical information regarding human exploration and colonization of the continent. Yet, reconstructed paleo-landscapes in the region extending from southern Alberta to northern Montana have focused almost exclusively on the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Billy Big Springs, a multi-component site located just east of East Glacier Park, provides new data on long-term natural (as old as 21,000 cal. BP) and cultural (post 14,000 to 700 cal. BP) landscape...
Ancient Maya Use of Fauna from the Wetlands and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how the ancient Maya interacted with wetland environments has been a topic of research for roughly 50 years. Previous studies suggest these resource-rich environments provided a diverse assortment of flora and fauna for the ancient Maya to utilize. Wetlands provide an ideal...
Ancient Maya Water Control, Wetlands, and the Fiery Pool (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of Steve Houston’s sublime volumes is The Fiery Pool, which was also a groundbreaking exhibit. These explored the themes of the Maya and their relationships with water. Here we consider the themes from The Fiery Pool from the perspectives of ancient Maya Wetland fields, "creatures", and...
Anthropocene Amazonia, Beyond the Buzzword: Centennial-Scale Anthropogenic Influences on Southern Amazonian Forests, 1000-2000 CE (2018)
The Anthropocene is defined here as the time when human-induced alterations of the environment become a driver of regional and global climate. The Amazon has very deep histories of human alterations of forest systems, but settled occupations that dramatically altered forest structure in regional systems of Late Holocene age, particularly following the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), ca. 900-1300 CE. Global population loss in the Old World, beginning in the 13th century, and the demographic...
The Anthropocene: Present Singular or Past Plural? (2018)
To what extent are Anthropocene dynamics prefigured or anticipated in microcosm during the later Quaternary, and how do scalar differences in environmental organization (result in anthropic processes working at different rates) complicate any search for a Golden Spike? Drawing on datasets from islands worldwide during the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene, this paper explores how humans drive change in biophysical systems, emphasizing similarities of type yet differences of scale between...
The Anthropogenic and Geogenic Coproduction of Seismically Triggered Soft Sediment Deformation Structures (SSDS) in Helike, Greece (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Factors of earthquakes in archaeology are often relegated to disaster and collapse narratives. Causality runs from the “natural” extreme to its human impacts. Following political ecology and Science and Technology Studies literatures and using the case of Helike, Greece, from the third millennium BCE to...
The Apparent Resilience of the Dry Tropical Forests of the Nicaraguan Region of the Central American Dry Corridor to Extreme Variations in Climate over the Last c.1200 Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central American dry corridor is currently and has historically been the most densely populated area of the Central American Isthmus and is subject to the greatest covariance in precipitation between seasons. The vegetation of this region was typically composed of dry tropical forests, which are suggested to be...
Application of a Novel Machine Learning Methodology to the Study of Dipodomys spp. Response to El Niño Southern Oscillation events Throughout the Holocene (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events influence climatic variation on a global scale, considerably impacting modern human and animal populations. There is, however, a dearth of literature regarding the long-term effects of ENSO variation on prehistoric vertebrate populations. Here we examine how kangaroo rat (Dipodomys...
The Application of Strontium Isotopes in Tracking Holocene Bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Light and heavy isotopic studies have become an integral tool in understanding the ecology of humans and vertebrates. In migration and mobility studies, strontium isotopes are used to determine if the individual is local to a particular area by comparing the isotopic values from bone and dental enamel...
Approaching Equifinality: Pollen and Non-pollen Palynomorphs as Complementary Paleoecological Proxies (2018)
In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...
Archaeological Open Air Hunter-Gatherer Sites in the Serranopolis Region, Brazil: An Interpretation of the Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological region of Serranópolis in Southestern Goias/Brazil stands out for its cultural material in rock shelter sites occupied by groups of hunter-gatheres and agricultural ceramists from 10,400 B.P to 915 B.P. The purpose of this paper is to verify the low frequency and visibility of open air sites, applying variables such as landscape, geology,...
Archaeological Plant Remains from the Lower Xingu (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 archaeological excavations at the sites of Jacupí, Carrazedo, and Gurupá in the Lower Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon have implemented a significant program for the recovery of plant remains, resulting in a large archaeobotanical assemblage currently undergoing analysis. Recent...