Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
26-50 (353 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological literature dealing with niche construction avoids hunter-gatherer behaviors, in part because they can be difficult to detect archaeologically. As the role of humans in shaping environments over long time scales becomes increasingly apparent, it is critical to develop archaeological...
Archaeological Recovery of Late Pleistocene Hair and Environmental DNA from Interior Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient hair and remnant plant DNA are important environmental proxies that preserve for millennia in specific archaeological contexts. However, recovery has been rare from late Pleistocene sites and more may be found if deliberately sought. Once discovered, singular hair fragments are not easily identified to taxa through comparative...
Archaeological Shoreline Monitoring in a Climate-Changing SW Florida: The Case of a Rapidly Eroding, Rare, Late-Archaic Shell Midden at Calusa Island (2018)
There are only a very few Archaic period sites in the Charlotte Harbor/Pine Island Sound region of southwest Florida. One of these, composing a large portion of Calusa Island, is an oyster-shell dominated midden. According to a landowner, since ca. 1973-1974 the site has suffered a horizontal loss of 11 m along parts (if not all) of its 80+meter, eroding archaeological shoreline. Based on a 1944 aerial photograph, it is likely that as much as 28 m has been eroded away. We began a monitoring...
Archaeology in the Age of the Anthropocene: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (2018)
The 2016 decision by the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to designate an Epoch based on a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) fixed at AD1950 is significant for managing global ecological systems moving forward. There is no serious scientific debate on whether humans have impacted the global ecology, but regardless of the ICS decision to anchor the so-called "Golden Spike" to the advent of the nuclear age, humans are known...
The Archaeology of Herring: A 10-Year Effort to Overcome Technical Challenges, Part 2 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific herring were an abundant and important component of the coastal ecosystems of western North America for millennia; today, many populations have been decimated as a result of commercial or reduction fisheries. Focusing on genomic data, our hypothesis was that population and phenological diversity was higher in ancient herring than...
Archaeology on Sheppard’s Island: Predictive Modeling and Heritage Preservation in Delaware’s Inter-Tidal Zone (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Bay is the second largest estuary along the U.S. Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from sea level rise. Most of the estuarine shoreline is fringed by salt marshes that have been developing for over 2,000 years but are now being lost at a rate of...
Arlington Springs Chronostratigraphy and Implications for Early Human Settlement along North America's Pacific Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What may be the earliest dated human skeletal remains so far discovered in North America come from the Arlington Springs Site on Santa Rosa Island, California. To corroborate the 13,077-12,656 2-sigma cal BP age of this ancient Native American, stratigraphic investigations were undertaken to place this discovery in its chronological and paleoenvironmental...
Assessing Agricultural Strategies in Prehistoric Korea through Climate and Landscape Models (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relict fields and archaeobotanical remains from village sites in South Korea indicate intensive agriculture was practiced during the Mumun Period (ca. 1500-200 B.C.). In this paper, we discuss the effects of climate and landscape in the decision-making of Mumun farmers, particularly which...
Assessing Malaria Risk in 19th Century Tucson, Arizona (2018)
Malaria is thought to have been brought to the Americas by early Spanish explorers. By the late 19th century, malaria had spread through human populations throughout tropical and temperate areas of the Americas, including the American Southwest. Historical documents, maps, and modern GIS data layers (e.g., DEM, soils, vegetation, land use, streams) from the area around Tucson, Arizona, were consulted and entered into ArcGIS (v.10) in order to produce a map of potential vector breeding locations...
Assessing Predictability of Dam Effects at Archaeological Sites Using Long-Term Repeat Lidar Surveys (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Repeat lidar surveys conducted over multiple years are a means of monitoring physical changes at archaeological sites with methods that are objective, replicable, accurate, and relatively low impact. These monitoring data can also be useful for testing assumptions about how archaeological site condition may change in response to changes in upstream dam...
Avifauna of the Bonneville Basin: Past Variation and Future Conservation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The final regression of Lake Bonneville during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition resulted in dramatic environmental changes in the Bonneville basin, followed by further environmental fluctuations throughout the Holocene. Recent research of faunal and floral...
Avifaunal Remains from the Palmrose Site (35CT47): Establishing Seasonality and Investigating Endangered Species (2018)
Avifaunal remains have great potential to improve archaeological understanding of the economy and subsistence of peoples who lived in the past, as well as to yield information about local ecology, environmental change, and past bird species distribution. The large assemblage of faunal remains from the three archaeological sites comprising the Seaside Collection from Seaside, OR, contains significant quantities of bird bone. Previous analyses of vertebrate remains (including birds) by Greenspan...
Back to ‘Ubeidiya: Renewed Excavations at an Early Pleistocene Site in the Levant (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 'Ubeidiya, Central Jordan Valley, Israel, is one of the earliest prehistoric sites outside Africa. Extensive excavations in the second half of the twentieth century yielded important archaeological, paleontological, and geological data, which provided insights into early Pleistocene hominins’ expansion out of Africa. The primary geological descriptions of...
Beringian Landscapes and Human Responses in the Middle Tanana Valley, Alaska (2018)
The middle Tanana Valley of interior Alaska, an unglaciated region of Eastern Beringia, holds a high-resolution record of human-environment interaction that extends over 14,000 years. The Late Glacial and early Holocene landscapes of this region were dynamic with considerable ecological restructuring. Aeolian deposits accumulated in lowland areas and adjacent foothills at relatively high rates, soils were relatively underdeveloped, river down-cutting prevailed across the valley, and wild fires...
Beyond a Record of Environmental Change: The Influence of Variability in Peat Composition on the Archaeological Record in Viking Age Iceland (2018)
Research suggests non-woody resources, such as peat, can serve as unique repositories of environmental change. This paper discusses how peat serves such a role, and sheds light on the how these processes affect the archaeological record, an aspect of environmental change that has been overlooked. During the colonization of Iceland in the 9th century AD, early Icelanders (Vikings) began to affect and be affected by local environments. Viking colonization led to rapid deforestation of woodland...
Beyond Coarse Correlations: Climate, Chronology, and Culture in Chicama, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent interest in applying archaeological datasets to climate change analyses have identified issues of data interoperability and challenges aligning cultural and climatic chronologies. Archaeology on Peru’s north coast has significant potential to address paleoclimate and future climate change adaptation. Despite this potential, reliance on imprecisely...
Beyond the Genome: Unravelling Life Processes Using Epigenomes and Ancient RNA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The power of ancient DNA to archaeological research needs little introduction. Recent technological revolutions in DNA sequencing have allowed entire populations, lineages, ecosystems, and epidemics to be reconstructed. While these large-scale studies address 'big picture’ questions of prehistory, more subtle, specific questions about past...
Bridging the "Kansyore gap": Continuous Occupation and Changing Subsistence Strategies at Namundiri A, Eastern Uganda (2018)
Environmental heterogeneity and climatic instability in the mid-Holocene (~8,000-3,000 BP) are linked to increased socioeconomic diversity in East Africa. Increasing aridity ca. 6,000-5,000 BP encouraged early herders to migrate south into the region, while local hunter-gatherers intensified their reliance on ecologically-rich environments. Kansyore hunter-gatherers of the Lake Victoria basin established specialized subsistence systems that incorporated heavy pottery-use and seasonal site...
Bringing Two Halves Together: Combining Modern Phylogenetics and Zooarchaeological Analysis to Understand Past and Present Trends of Freshwater Mussels (Unionidae) in Mesoamerica (2018)
For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest Belize (2023)
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. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
Carbon Enamel Isotopes as Proxy for Dietary Changes in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2 and 1.4 Ma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...
Carbon Legacies of Dryland Agricultural Features in the Ancient Southwest (2018)
This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis of soil organic carbon measurements associated with pre-Columbian dryland agricultural fields in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In aggregate, rock alignments and terraces are associated with significantly higher organic carbon concentrations, and this effect is pronounced in sandy parent material. The results support a hypothesis that resource conserving features constructed by indigenous farmers continue to influence the ecology...
Carbonized Wood Remains from the Matacanela Site, Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper describes the carbonized wood remains recovered from fifty-five heavy fractions of flotation from seven units and fifty light fractions of flotation from six units collected during the excavations of the Matacanela Site in Veracruz, Mexico. Environmental comparisons are...
Chacoan Outlier Depopulation and 12th Century Arroyo Cutting near Zuni Salt Lake, New Mexico (2018)
Depopulation of Chacoan outlier settlements in the Cibola culture area near Zuni Salt Lake ~AD 1130 has been attributed to the onset of a persistent 50-year drought. Prior alluvial stratigraphy studies concluded that arroyo formation near these settlements occurred two centuries after this exodus and therefore was not a contributing factor. The present study used a larger sample of radiocarbon dates, including short-lived, charred plant material from alluvial contexts and tree-rings from several...
Challenges for Archaeologists: A Changing Climate Is Only One Development (2018)
There is general awareness among cultural heritage professionals, including archaeologists, that a drastically changing climate requires re-examination of our responsibilities and practices for identifying, documenting and managing sites and objects. The occurrence and effects of phenomena such as warming temperatures, sea-level rise, desertification, violent storms, and flooding, are frequently discussed. However, the socio-economic ramifications of a changing climate and severe weather events,...