Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
301-325 (436 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preserved in the complex cut-and-fill stratigraphy of an alluvial fan, the Water Canyon site represents one of the most notable and rare Paleoindian sites in the American Southwest west of the Pecos River for having an in situ, stratified multi-component Paleoindian record. Paleoindian cultures currently represented at the site include Clovis, Folsom,...
Paleolandscape Reconstruction Using Geoproxy Evidence at Erfkroon, a Middle to Later Stone Age Occupation in South Africa’s Continental Interior (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Erfkroon is situated in South Africa’s Modder River Valley and is known for its well-stratified fluvial landscape and archaeologically rich terrace systems. The Orangia terrace is the subject of ongoing investigations because it is characterized by abundant in situ alluvial deposits containing Middle and Later Stone Age artifact assemblages in context with...
Paleopollution and Environmental Consequences of Bronze Craft Production during the Shang Periods in Anyang, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this study is to understand the relationship between bronze production and paleopollution during the middle and late Shang periods (1450-1045 BCE) in Anyang. Archaeologists have discovered several bronze workshops operating during these periods. These workshops were located among residential areas, and the long-term bronze production activity at Anyang could...
Paleoseismology at Old Town Ridge (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the fall of 2018 personnel from the Arkansas Archeological Survey, University of Memphis, and the Natural and Cultural Resources Services conducted investigations at Old Town Ridge (3CG41) to determine if Mississippian period Native Americans abandoned the site circa A.D.1400 because of earthquake activity. Excavation of Trench A exposed four sediment...
Paleostorms and Precolonial Societies: Hurricane Deposits in Inundated Archaeological Sites in Northwest Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How people respond to their environment is an ongoing theme in archaeological research. However, it is not well understood how people in the past responded to rapid high energy events such as hurricanes and if planning for these events did or did not occur. To understand how hurricanes affected people in the past, we need to...
Paleotemperature Reconstructions of the Upland United States Southwest for the Last 2,000 Years (2018)
While paleoclimate reconstructions have improved across the last decade, the data and models are often still difficult to access, process, and interpret. However, improvements in these techniques, and the increasing breadth of paleoclimatic proxies available have furthered our understanding of the effects of climate-driven variability on past societies. Here we introduce a model being implemented by the SKOPE Project—Synthesizing Knowledge Of Past Environments. This application (openSKOPE.org)...
Paleozoological Baselines Inform Climate Change and Help to Restore Indigenous Socioecological Systems: A Case Study from the Bear River Basin, UT (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As human impacts on ecosystems accelerate, there is a growing emphasis in conservation planning toward maximizing the capacity of ecosystems to respond to anticipated changes in the near future. Doing so requires understanding how ecosystems responded to past changes (e.g., human impacts,...
Palynological Investigations of 17th Century Spanish Colonialism and Ecological Change at LA 20,000, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will use archaeological pollen data from LA 20,000, a Spanish rancho site located approximately 12 miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to investigate how Pueblo and Spanish environmental alteration made long-term, complex changes to the landscape. By identifying and quantifying pollen taxa, this research will demonstrate how plant population...
Party on the Plaza: Risk and Resilience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century New Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish colonial efforts in New Mexico began in 1598 with the establishment of a capital in Santa Fe, as well as missions, ranches, and farms. Documents from the early colonial period (AD 1598–1680) are rife with colonists’ concerns about the New Mexican environment, indicating struggles at the household scale to...
Past Particles: Palynology at Poverty Point (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first pollen work at Poverty Point was conducted by Sears at the request of Ford and Webb in the 1950s. Since then, more evidence has been collected, leading to alternate interpretations of the site and resolving some matters while raising new questions to explore. This paper reviews palynological...
Pastoral Societies, Holocene Climate and Technology: Perspectives from Iron Age Southern Jordan (Session 4400) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did pastoral societies evolve into more complex social organizations in what is today a hyper-arid desert zone? This paper examines the Iron Age (ca 1200 - 500 BC) data from southern Jordan that indicates relatively little climate change from today, yet the rise of complex pastoral nomadic societies.
Persistence of the Anthropocene in the Maya Lowlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya Lowlands have been a focus of human development across millennia, and the impact of Maya civilization on this tropical environment has been a focus of sustained research and intense debate. It has become common to discuss environmental crises and societal collapse in the region as analogous to contemporary socio-environmental problems. However, the...
Phytolith Assemblages as a Proxy for Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction in the Southern Caucasus (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Southern Caucasus is a biodiversity hotspot, encompassing a spectrum of environments from temperate forests to semidesert steppes. Having seen hominin occupation since 1.8 Ma, the region offers a unique opportunity to study the expansion and evolution of the genus Homo, as well as their interaction with the local...
“Place for a Walrus to Haul Out”: Marine Mammals and Polynya Archaeology in Northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Arctic Canada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Inuit Nunangat (the traditional Inuit territories of what is now Canada), the Little Ice Age (LIA) climate change episode likely resulted in significant changes in seasonal sea-ice abundance, thereby affecting relatively delicate coastal food webs. In this paper, we present the results-to-date of recent survey and excavation at Uglit (NfHd-1), a...
Plant Management, Resilience and Environmental Changes in the Wetlands of Nigeria (2018)
Palaeoenvironmental data obtained from coastal areas (wetlands) of southern Nigeria reveal three main periods of climatic changes from the Mid Holocene-Present namely (i) very wet (ca. 6,000-5,000 BP), (ii) dry (ca. 4,500-2,500 BP) and (iii) humid periods (ca. 2,500-Present). This paper explores the dynamic ways in which the culture of plant management and plant food resources in these marginal lands has been expressed within the context of environmental change. The similarities in the...
Plant Use in Elite Domestic Context at Nim li Punit (AD 150 to 830), Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe the paleobotanical collection from Nim li Punit (AD 150 to 830), a small-scale center in the Toledo District, Belize. The samples were collected from Structure 50, a range building that we interpret to be a Late Classic (AD 700 to 830) elite domestic context. This was a time of growth and change for Nim li Punit, where new construction coincided...
Popularising the Archaeology of Climate Change (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the need to popularise the archaeology of climate change beyond our professional networks to the general public via museums and education as well as the media. We will discuss ways to translate the archaeology of climate change into actionable science to inform decision making within a global framework of climate change action in...
Population Reconstructions for Humans and Megafauna Suggest Mixed Causes for North American Pleistocene Extinctions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and horse (i.e., "megafauna") disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention, even though such information may...
Pre-Columbian Adaptation to Fluvial Environments, Chontales, Central Nicaragua: 2018 PRISMA Results. (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. Alluvial valleys are dynamic environments that continuously change under the influences of flooding and erosive processes caused by climatic and tectonic events. The Roberto Amador site is situated on alluvial deposits, surrounded by a meander of the Mayales River, in the proximity of the city of Juigalpa, Chontales,...
Prearchaic Settlement Distribution in the Central Great Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first occupants of the Great Basin settled the region when highly profitable wetland environments were abundant, but their spatial distribution was highly variable. Results of our earlier work identified an interesting pattern driven by this variation: Prearchaic (>8000 BP) settlements in the Lahontan and Bonneville Basins were closer to pluvial lakes than...
Predators and Prey among the Ancient Maya: A GIS Approach to Understanding Archaeofauna and Past Environments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-caused environmental changes and their effects on the Classic Maya continue to be topics of vital research importance. Zooarchaeological data can provide valuable inferences about ancient Maya environments but must be assessed with care. In the Maya area, habitat fidelity models use high predator abundances to indicate the local presence of the...
Prioritization Frameworks and Archaeological Decision-Making in a Changing North (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. The impact of climate change on heritage sites is a subject that is discussed with increasing urgency in arctic archaeology. Frequently used metaphors like “burning libraries” or “ticking clocks” capture the visceral feeling of loss experienced by both archaeologists and Inuit communities who witness destructions firsthand....
Prioritizing Site Loss in the Delaware Bay, USA, Using Probabalistic Modeling (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Bay is the second largest estuary along the US Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from climate-driven sea level rise along the East Coast. Certain areas along the bay have the lowest mean elevation in the USA and are experiencing both accelerated sea level...
Prioritizing What We Don’t Know: Climate Change as a Catalyst for Upland Survey (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The upland forests of the Appalachians are among the most diverse natural communities in the temperate world, providing the setting for a study of change and flexibility as an essential feature of existence, both for precontact and historic cultures. However, upland archaeology has lagged due to...
Pristine Forests of Southern Chile? Evidence for a Millennium of Anthropogenic Woodlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevance of the temperate forests of South America (35°S–55°S) have been acknowledged in ecological and biodiversity terms. Although evidence of human settlements in this vast territory goes back to ∼14,600 cal yr BP, these forests are commonly referred to as pristine or natural environments. In Southern Chile, paleoenvironmental studies indicate that...