Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
126-150 (353 Records)
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. Airborne laser scanning (ALS), also referred to as lidar, has enabled archaeologists, geologists, geomorphologists, and many others to identify and map ancient modifications of the landscape under dense forest canopies. The impact of ALS in archaeological settlement research has been profound and, to some, even...
Farmers and Late Holocene Climate Change on the Edge of the Qinghai Plateau (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late Holocene, a cooling and drying climate, greater intergroup contact, and increasing sociopolitical complexity prevailed across Eurasia. On the eastern edge of the Qinghai Plateau, at the edge of the East Asian summer monsoon zone, millet farming societies faced local, cyclical changes to moisture and vegetation between 3000...
Farming, Warfare, Drought, and Soil Fertility in the Mississippian Central Illinois River Valley: Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes on Maize Kernels from Five Sites Spanning Two Centuries (2018)
We report on carbon and nitrogen isotope results from a total of 60 maize kernels from five sequentially-occupied sites in the Central Illinois River Valley that span the Mississippian period (AD 1100-1300). The sites span: (1) the onset of and intensification of warfare in the region; and (2) a long period of drought that eventually gave way to wetter conditions during the last 50 years of the sequence. C13 and N15 isotope values from these maize kernels provide independent support for the...
Feeding a Citadel: Subsistence Practices (2023)
This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla is an ancient Maya site situated in the El Zotz Biotope in the central Petén of Guatemala. This study focuses on the paleoenvironmental changes, agricultural subsistence, and occupational trajectories of La Cuernavilla, based on data gathered from across the larger landscape between 2009 and 2017 on the Proyecto...
Finding Sites in the Amazon Forest: AI-Based Deep Learning Analysis of Satellite Imagery from the Upper Xingu Basin, Brazil (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. This paper summarizes preliminary results of an AI-based analysis that identifies potential precolumbian Amazonian archaeological site locations based on the presence of clusters of a specific species of palm tree. The study uses Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Planet satellite imagery as...
‘Finding the time’: A Long-Term Perspective on Human Interactions with Tropical Landscapes and Its Implications for Sustainability (2018)
Archaeology provides a truly long-term record of anthropogenic landscape interactions and human responses to environmental change. Such a record is particularly important in tropical settings that contain some of the most threatened terrestrial ecosystems in the world today. However, poor preservation and assumed human avoidance have meant that past records of human behaviour have been patchy for these biomes. Here, I review how new methodologies and archaeological interest has enriched datasets...
Fire and Vegetation Dynamics: Blazing the Trail in Pre-contact Southern New England (2018)
The concept that Native Americans were using fire for wide spread vegetation control and subsistence procurement during the pre-contact period in Southern New England has long been excepted as common practice, leading to changes in the landscape and then settlement patterns. However, save for the accounts of early explorers and colonists, whose goal was to solicit the "new land" as a familiar landscape and not an unknown wilderness, there is little supporting scientific evidence. This paper...
First Human Occupations of the Southern Atacama Desert (24.5° S): Settlement Dynamics and Environmental Context (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early peopling of the Atacama Desert coincided with the Central Andean Pluvial Event II (CAPE II), an extensive pluvial event during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene (13,800–8500 cal yr BP). A large number of early human archaeological sites from this period have been found along the borders of the Imilac and Punta Negra (24.5° S) high altitude basins...
Flexibility Against Fragility at the Diallowali Site System during the 1st Millennium BC (2018)
The first millennium BC was a period of dramatic social and environmental change throughout West Africa. Along the Middle Senegal Valley (MSV), communities experienced rapid and dramatic changes to biospheric conditions accompanied by largescale technological, social, and economic reorganizations. On the western edge of the MSV, the inhabitants of the Diallowali site system developed a network of flexible institutions capable of maintaining a thriving community throughout this turbulent period....
Formation and Context of Sitio Chivacabe, Western Highland Guatemala (2018)
Located in the Highlands of western Guatemala, Chivacabe is a Pleistocene-age bone bed and Archaic-age archaeological site. In 2009 the site was subjected to intensive geoarchaeological investigation with the goals of identifying the relationship between the faunal and archaeological remains through developing an understanding of their context. Three allostratigraphic units were identified: The oldest unit, which contains the bone bed, consists of colluvially reworked tephra bracketed by...
Fremont Maize Cultivation and Latest Holocene Climate Variability in the Cub Creek Archaeological District, Dinosaur National Monument (2018)
The Cub Creek Archaeological District in northern Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument was an early center of Fremont maize cultivation and village settlement AD 450-850. Cub Creek lies near the northern limit of maize cultivation in western North America in the foothills of the Uinta Mountain Range. We couple a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon-dated pithouses and roasting features with a 2,115-year tree-ring reconstruction of August-July precipitation to explore relationships between Fremont...
From Pozuelo to Paracas: An Approach to the Processes of Formation and Social Complexity in Early Societies in the Chincha Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paracas, believed to be the oldest complex society on the southern coast of Peru, occupied the Chincha Valley during part of the Formative Period (400–200 BCE). Although there is evidence of the Paracas occupation throughout the Chincha Valley, little is known about the formation of Paracas within the valley. Relatively...
From Soil to Society: Local Variability in Inferred Climatic and Environmental Change and Landuse in the Valencian Community, Spain (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climatic and environmental factors are ‘creeping’ phenomena with rapid thresholds, and there is a disjuncture between product and best-practice in terms of landuse. The ways in which people engage with their environment are necessarily influenced by the nature of the given region, but the form of that engagement is contingent on cultural and historical...
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...
Genetic Analysis of Microbial Community Structure in Soils from the Hell Gap Witness Block (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleomicrobiology is probably best known as an approach that yields anthropological findings connected to human health and disease, such as long-term records of oral microbiomes recovered from ancient dental calculus. However, the tools of microbial ecology have been tested for their potential to address other anthropological...
A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Site Formation Processes and Late Pleistocene and Holocene Environmental Change at the Foxwood Farm site (38PN35) (2018)
The Foxwood Farm site (38PN35) is deeply stratified (4.8 m) sedimentary sequence located on the Oolenoy River, near the boundary between the Piedmont and Blue Ridge in Pickens County, South Carolina. The lower most sediments, (4.8 to 3.2 m), consisting of channel gravels, lateral accretion sands, and clays, were deposited during the late Pleistocene prior to 12.6 ka. These sediments exhibit a fining upward sequence from channel gravels and sands, through bar sands, to a cap of clays. The upper...
The Geoarcheology of Vista Alegre (2018)
The maritime Maya site of Vista Alegre, located in the northeastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula is being investigated with the aim to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the daily life of the past inhabitants, and their interaction with their surrounding environment. Results from a sediment core campaign resolved the character, environmental associations, and ages of underlying sediments. To achieve a continues lateral understanding of the underlying sediments, a seismic survey was...
Geochemical and Sedimentary-Based Reconstruction of the Palaeoenvironment and Formation of the Late Stone Age Site of Txina-Txina (Massingir, Mozambique) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study aimed to reconstruct Txina-Txina site (located between the junction of Machampane and Chifati rivers, Southeastern Mozambique) paleoenvironment and site formation processes to better understand its occupation pattern, preservation of archaeological materials and the impact of palaeoenvironmental changes on human evolution. For this, we collected...
Geographical Margins as Key to Understanding Crop Dispersal Mechanisms in Prehistory: Case Study for Kyrgyzstan (2018)
More than 8000 years ago, a variety of crop species began to spread across Eurasia, reaching its edges approximately 4000 years later. The chain of mountains that stretches across Central Asia constituted a geographical obstacle that slowed down the dispersal process. Special high altitude adaptive strategies were required not only by humans, but also by plants due to changes in the length of the growing season, climatic conditions, UV intensity, among other factors. Therefore, the mountain...
Getting to Know the Neighbors: Commensal Insights into Human-Ecosystem Dynamics (2018)
Advances in zooarchaeological method and theory, increased attention to the recovery and analysis of microfaunal remains, and multidisciplinary collaborative research have generated increasingly nuanced understandings of past human-animal relationships. This paper provides a brief introduction to archaeological investigations of commensal fauna, highlighting the myriad ways that research focused on the commensal niche sheds new light on past societies and ecosystems. A case study from Makangale...
Ghosts of Climates Past: Evaluating the Effects of Climate Change on the Foraging Ecology of Paleoindian Hunter-Gatherers in the North American Great Plains (2018)
The environment has a strong influence on the evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherer foraging. Studies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often made hypotheses regarding the effect of climate on foraging strategies, but have rarely tested those hypotheses. The absence of explicit hypothesis testing has been partly due to a dearth of operationalized paleoenvironmental variables. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been abundant, particularly those based on pollen, they have mostly...
GIS Analysis of Environmental Change during the Paleoindian Period in Central Texas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the advent of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technologies, GIS has allowed archaeologists to ask new questions of the archaeological record. The state of Texas has one of the richest archaeological records in North America from decades of work by professional, academic, and avocational archaeologists. Due to Texas’ rich archaeology record, ample...
Giving Form to Flow: Modeling Paleohydrology in North-Central Coastal Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In coastal Andean archaeology, long-standing interest in water and cultural dynamics is intensifying, especially with diminishing glacial water supplies in the coast’s headwater regions. However, archaeologists who have hinged their hypotheses on the availability or management of water resources have frequently overlooked or disregarded the non-linear ways...
Gone with the Wind: The Modelling of the Wind Conditions of the Prehistoric and Historic Communities around the World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climatic conditions determine the ways in which local communities live to a great extent. The wind is responsible for the everyday life experience by bringing precipitation, moving dust and fire. The general assumption of the current research is that in the past people chose to live in relatively calm spots of the local landscapes to prevent themselves from...
Habitat Preferences in Early Hominins and the Origin of the Human Lineage (2018)
Early hominins, such as australopithecines, are characterized by bipedality and enlarged posterior teeth. Originally, these traits were thought to be adaptations to an open environment. However, discoveries of older hominins, such as Ardipithecus that were possibly only occasionally bipedal and did not have enlarged teeth, have refocused the origins of early hominins within a much more closed, wooded setting. Even the later australopithecines are currently cast as inhabitants of mosaic...