Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
76-100 (353 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...
Convergence Research and the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (2018)
Archaeological forays into the climate change debate have generally been through case studies that integrate archaeological, anthropological, and paleoenvironmental data into coherent, evidence-based narratives that document how cultural systems in a relatively small geographic region adapted to long-term climatic change. While these cautionary tales can play a valuable role in galvanizing public opinion, they generally have not influenced public policy. What is lacking are scalable inferences...
Decontaminating Archaeological Dental Calculus: A Protocol for Reliable Extractions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During dental calculus formation, mineralization preserves microbotanical remains. These provide paleoenvironmental and dietary information. However, modern contaminants on archaeological samples overlap with target species thus necessitating decontamination procedures. We present an efficient protocol to avoid the presence of contaminants: a) testing the...
Deep Ecology: An Introduction and an Inquiry (2018)
Archaeology has engaged with ecology in various ways over the years. Recently, post-humanist thinking has gained popularity as an approach, urging us to think about human and non-humans relationally, as having contingent qualities that vary in relation to their interaction over time. Simultaneously, we see increasing attempts to think with indigenous philosophies and descendent communities about what the environment is and does. However, there remains a disconnect between approaches that seek to...
Demographic Change through Analysis of Age Profiles of Burial Data (2018)
A series of mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain provide a dataset useful for analyzing demographic change through examination of age profiles. Other archaeological data suggest that populations peaked during the Late Archaic period (4000-800 BP) and sharply declined during the Late Prehistoric period (800-350 BP). Analysis of the ratio of adults to young individuals has been used to identify rapid population growth among other populations. Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Texas...
Detecting el Niño’s Disasters: Remote Sensing of Recent ENSO Events in Northern Peru and Implications for Prehispanic Societies (2018)
Several models have discussed links between warm (el Niño) phases of the el Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and cultural developments on Peru’s north coast. In particular, the abandonment of Moche settlements and agricultural systems and periods of social stress in both Moche and Chimu societies have been interpreted through the lens of ENSO disasters. ENSOs during the years 1982-83, 1997-98, and most recently 2016-17 offer the opportunity to better understand the spatial development of el...
Determining the Impact of Major Storm Events on Ancient Peoples of Coastal Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For this project, I assess the potential effects that periods of increased storm frequency and intensity may have had on the lives and behaviors of ancient coastal Florida populations. Using sediment grain size analysis, storm periods were retrodicted and organized into regional storm chronologies for 5 lake bed sediment cores within the East and Central,...
Developing a Geomorphic and Archaeological History of Painters Flat (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painters Flat is a small basin along the California/Nevada border and has never been described in literature. This past summer, the Far Western Anthropological Research Group recorded numerous sites spanning the entire chronological sequence for the region. Along with archaeological data, I collected information on landforms, profiles, and outcrops to...
Did the Neolithic Revolution Revolutionize the European Landscape? An Analysis of the Relationship between Climate, Vegetation, and the Arrival of Agro-pastoral Subsistence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site-specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in...
Dietary and Environmental Reconstruction with Stable Isotopes of Early, Middle and Late Holocene Humans from Northern Malawi (2018)
The early Holocene African humid period (AHP, ~12,000-6000 bp) was followed by the Middle Holocene dry phase (MHDP, ~6000-3500 BP), and the modern climatic regime was established during the later Holocene (~3500 bp to present). The relationship of environmental change to human social and territorial organization adaptations are fairly well-documented in northern, eastern and southern Africa. However, the Holocene terrestrial record of environmental change in east-central Africa is poorly...
Dimensions, Links, and Scales in the Behavioral Ecology of Inequality (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) initially focused on individual actors optimizing in a single decision category over very short time scales—“Robinson Crusoe rustles up lunch.” Current and future progress in HBE entails several intertwined developments, of which we address three: (a) attending to social dimensions, by drawing on evolutionary social...
Disappearing Past: Seasonal Coastal Settlements in NW Iceland (Ninth–Fifteenth Centuries) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the settlement of Iceland there has always been a dependence on marine resources. Furthermore, studies have shown marine resources were being utilized far inland, indicating exchange networks from the start of the settlement period. However, there is a research bias within Icelandic archaeology, which has been...
DNA-Based Determination of Microbial Community Structure in Soils from the La Prele Mammoth Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" 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 questions, and aid in...
Doc Holliday Goes to Tombstone (2018)
In 2002 Vance won the role of Executive Director for the Argonaut Archaeological Research Fund (AARF) at the University of Arizona. The program provided immediate funding for a number of graduate students working on the archaeology and Quaternary geology of the Desert Southwest. A renewed investigation of the upper San Pedro Basin was among those projects. Vance endured every possible graduate student misstep, some of which are reviewed here, to assemble new information about long-term and hotly...
Does Exposure to Heat Alter Stable Isotope Values of Ostrich Eggshell? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites in Africa and Asia often contain large amounts of eggshell fragments from ostriches (Struthio spp.), indicating that these birds and their eggs were a valuable source of protein and calories for hunter-gatherers. Despite their abundance, however, ostrich eggshell (OES) remains understudied. Stable isotopic values preserved in...
Does Increasing Social Complexity Buffer Energy Consumption from the Effects of High Frequency Climate Variation? A Western European Case Study (2018)
Humans, like any other organism, must continuously adapt to or modify their surrounding environment to maximize their fitness. One of the main sources of environmental variation that humans must cope with is climate variation. Adjustment to climate variation may include increasing investments in infrastructure (social, technological, cognitive), which acts as a buffer, filtering out the effects of higher frequency climate variation on the ability of individuals and populations to consume energy,...
"Down to Earth": The Primacy of the Terrestrial (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of the Critical Zone makes clear that our future depends on the layer between the atmosphere and bedrock: the earth—which tellingly also serves as the name for our planet. Our Earth’s soils record the past and structure the future. Tim and Sheryl have worked in many places in the world, but I know them...
Drought and Cultural Instability (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. Geologists and biologists work with archaeologists to address compelling questions about cultures of the past. Earth scientists who study tree rings, ice cores, speleothems, and lake sediment cores can provide information about the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental contexts in which ancient cultures developed,...
Drought, Diet, Demography, and Diaspora during the Mississippian Period: A View from the Central Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades archaeologists have conjectured about the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Mississippian and related pre-Columbian populations in midcontinental North America. Until recently, climatological reconstructions were coarse grained and lacked the temporal and spatial resolution to link in any...
Early Occupations of the Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene in the Northern Highlands of the Semiarid North of Chile (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here, we present the results of archaeological surveys and excavations carried out in the Pedernales Salt Flat and the upper course of the Jorquera River (26°–27° S, 3,000–4,500 m asl). Environmentally, they are characterized by an Andean steppe with biotic resources distributed in patches. Surveys were directed toward specific geoforms such as river terraces,...
Early Settlement on the Island of Grenada: Ecological Evidence for the Extinction of Rodents and Palms (2018)
Evidence of Archaic age settlement with possible rodent harvesting is apparent in two well-dated sediment cores collected in northeastern Grenada. At around 3600 BC, large scale burning on the island coincides with severe forest modification including the total elimination of at least two species of palms. The selective, though possibly unintentional, removal of economically valuable palms suggests the influence of a non-human variable into the equation. I propose that the removal of a...
Earthquakes as Nonhuman Agents in the Roman – Late Antique Mediterranean (2018)
Recent studies of the sociology of contemporary earthquakes have emphasized the generative physical spaces of potentiality created by these disasters: the destruction of earthquakes, while traumatic for survivors, also clears the way for large-scale infrastructural and architectural development programs that can re-shape aged urban environments to better reflect changing societal values and priorities. This paper offers a survey of earthquakes as non-human change agents in the Roman and Late...
Ecologies of Space and Time: The Shared History of Humans and Fire in the Jemez Mountains, NM (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the southwestern US humans and ecosystems share a history of fire. An integrated archaeo-ecological framework offers an important interpretive lens for both archaeologists and ecologists. Contemporary ecological patterns and processes that are thought to be ‘native’ or ‘natural’ may in fact be highly influenced by past...
Ecology and Human Habitation of Andean Forests (2018)
People have altered the naturally forested areas of the tropical Andes for natural resources and as places for settlements. The forests collectively represent a global biodiversity hotspot, with many unique species. Environmental gradients are abrupt, with dramatic changes in temperature regimes with altitude, but also with switches in humidity from dry to pluvial depending on exposure to prevailing winds. The steep environmental gradients create dispersal barriers to plants and animals,...
The Effect of Prehispanic Metallurgy on the Environment of a Tropical Rain Forest in Jicalán, Michoacán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A core of 23 cm was recovered from a lake bed, now a dam, in Jicalán Viejo. The core was sampled for pollen analysis at every centimeter. Pollen analysis describes the presence of a tropical rain forest with tree...