Environment and Climate  (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Plew. Louisa Daggers.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Guyana’s shell midden complex, which stretches across its northwestern coast, documents more than 7,500 years of human land use. Traditional interpretations of the middens have assumed a degree of environmental constancy save for fluctuating Holocene sea levels associated with species found in marine and brackish waters. This study provides a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Somerville.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope values of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in animal bones are influenced by the environmental and climatic conditions present during the lifetime of the organisms. Stable isotope analysis of faunal bones thus permits the reconstruction of past environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ari Caramanica.

By Late Preceramic Perú (3000-2100 BC) lomas environments were largely abandoned in favor of riparian and littoral ecozones, and hunting and gathering subsistence strategies were increasingly replaced by agriculture. This change coincided with the emergence of several hallmarks of complexity: monumental architecture, specialization, and hierarchical organization. The role that environmental degradation or climate change played in this transition remains a subject of debate. This paper presents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Sykora. Justin Tackney. R. Kelly Beck. Dennis H. O'Rourke. Jack M. Broughton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analyses have for some time suggested that California tule elk (Cervus elaphus nannodes) populations were depressed by late Holocene hunters, and more recent preliminary analyses focused on aDNA and stable isotopes (carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen) have supported that conclusion. This work indicated a significant decrease over time in genetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-environmental relations, mediated by builders and householders, are visible in the framework of vernacular buildings. The builder’s selection in material is mediated by geography and ecology, as well as land management practices, law, and social custom. In West Suffolk, England, there are hundreds of timber-framed buildings constructed between 1450...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Scharf.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents proxies of vegetation, climate, human population, and fire from late Holocene sediments from the Columbia Plateau (USA). Statisitical analyses such as multivariate regression and Granger Causality time series analysis are used to reduce complexity and illuminate the underlying structure of the data set. Results show that multivariate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ahmed Nassr. Zeljko Rezek.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022 we recorded more than 40 variously dense stone artifact concentrations of the Middle Stone Age in northern Butana between the Nile Valley and the Atbara paleolake in east-central Sudan. In general, the entire region between the Upper Egypt and the Ethiopian Highlands has seen very little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Christian John. Jessica Munson. Christopher Morehart.

With the rise of structure from motion (SfM), affordable unmanned aerial vehicles, and other advances in remote sensing, landscape archaeology is at a watershed moment. These new tools allow for the mapping and digital reconstruction of large swaths of land rapidly enough to be reviewed in the field at a spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution that rivals any previous technology. Away from the field, these reconstructions are invaluable datasets that can be used to analyze the landscape at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Carpenter. Guadalupe Sanchez Miranda.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent interdisciplinary investigations have revealed that the Sonoran Desert region is not only one of the earliest regions occupied in the Americas, but also demonstrates one of the longest continuous occupation records. The earliest Sonorans were proboscidean hunters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Markham.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change is the fastest growing threat to World Heritage properties, including archaeological sites, worldwide. Warming temperatures, sea level rise, coastal erosion, permafrost thaw, drought, worsening wildfires and more intense rainstorms, hurricanes and typhoons are putting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Puckett.

Over the last 15,000 years, Walker Lake, NV has ranged in size from the southernmost branch of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan to a small alkali wetland. These conditions have provided valuable, but varied resources for local populations throughout human occupation. Sites identified during summer 2015 and 2016 illustrate the preservation of sites in environments where both submersion and drying have occurred. Investigations during summer 2017 revealed the presence of numerous landforms under the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Taieb. Claire Alix. Glenn P. Juday. Owen K. Mason. Christophe Petit.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first and only millennial tree-ring chronology (AD 978–1941) in northwest Alaska was developed in the 1940s by archaeologist and dendrochronology pioneer J. L. Giddings. Constructed from living trees and archaeological samples from the Kobuk River valley, Giddings’s sequence established the chronology of the “Arctic Woodland Culture.” As Alaskan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Sánchez-Morales. Timothy Beach.

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. I present an interpretation of a 5 m sedimentary sequence from Laguna Tortuguero, Puerto Rico, based on new radiocarbon dates, X-ray diffraction, magnetic susceptibility, and carbon isotope data. I also highlight the merits of revisiting old but significant paleoenvironmental records to understand past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Mohammadi. Stefan Woehlke. Olivia Meoni.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North Brentwood is a historic Black community on the outskirts of Washington, DC. It is the second Black town incorporated in Maryland, and the first suburban one in the state. Its founding is steeped in the exploitation of social and environmental infrastructures to turn a profit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Neves.

The archaeological record of the Middle Holocene is lacking in many areas of lowland South America. The reasons for such hiatuses are yet not clear, but there is an emerging pattern showing that the areas where one finds complete records of human occupation that span most of the Holocene are typically located on estuaries, extensive floodplains or other wetlands normally placed at ecotones. On the other hand, mounting paleoeocological data shows that the climatic conditions of the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Solleiro-Rebolledo. Georgina Ibarra. Sergey Sedov.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the paleoenvironmental information for the Basin of Mexico for the basin comes from sedimentary proxies, which unfortunately are incomplete for the terminal Pleistocene and the Holocene. In this paper, we present a temporal and spatial reconstruction of past soil cover in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Vance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project broadly examines shell ring growth patterns in the Pacific bivalve S. crassisquama (princeps). Spondylus shells were incorporated into pre-Columbian Inca (and greater Andean) ceremonial and ritualistic practices consistently until Spanish colonization. Existing paleoecological and archaeomalacology approaches have relied on oxygen isotopic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garry Running.

In this paper I link ongoing research along the eastern shore of Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA) to Doc Holliday, the person who made it possible. Doc instilled in his students an interdisciplinary mind-set, and taught them to emphasize archaeological questions first and to consider past human groups as active agents of paleoenvironmental change as well as sophisticated responders to it. My research up North began where the ancestral Sheyenne River entered GLA from the west. After patient mentoring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ayers-Rigsby. Rachael Kangas.

Miami is often presented as the poster child of sea level rise; while climate change is generally accepted as an observable fact in south Florida, elsewhere this issue is regarded as too politically charged for frequent discussion. This renders sensitive archaeological sites vulnerable to coastal erosion, storm surge, and other factors. The Florida Public Archaeology Network’s Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) Florida program is designed to raise awareness of how these factors will impact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King.

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. A study commissioned in 2015 by the St. Mary’s County, Maryland Historic Preservation Commission sought to measure the impacts of residential and commercial development on the county’s archaeological resources. The study’s findings revealed minimal impact by development but a stunning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yucheng Wang. Bianca De Sanctis. Ruairidh Macleod. Pavel Tarasov. Eske Willerslev.

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Detailed reconstruction of paleo-ecosystems is the key for understanding the interactions of climate changes, ecological variation, and human activities. In this study, we applied novel environmental DNA (eDNA) shotgun metagenomics methods on the ancient eDNA isolated from the lake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Usumacinta River and its tributaries played an integral role in the survival and growth of Maya communities in the southern lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala. Early human settlements relied on the river as a source of food and transportation. Examining the animal bones and shell remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Lewis-Sing. Oscar Moro Abadia. Julia Brenan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in ‘places of shame’, i.e. places related to past traumatic, painful, or regrettable human actions. In this paper we argue this concept can be expanded to incorporate sites with negative ecological impact. In particular, the interpretation of places of single-use plastic waste accumulation as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walls. Pauline Knudsen. Naotaka Hayashi. Pivinnguaq Mørch.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites in the Qaanaaq region of Northwest Greenland are under a variety of threats related to climate change. In addition to processes observed in other arctic contexts (increased coastal erosion and melting permafrost), the area has seen a dramatic surge in landslides...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Graf. Nathan Shelley. Julie Esdale. Ted Goebel.

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. Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ is located approximately 55 km southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, approximately 55 km northwest of the Broken Mammoth / Mead/Holzman / Swan Point complex of sites, and about 18 km northwest of Upward Sun River. Continuing excavations have provided tens of thousands of material remains, consisting mostly of lithic...