Environment and Climate  (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Gonzalez. Brandi Reger. Sarah Hardage. Russell Skowronek.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The South Texas Sand Sheet (STSS) spans ~7,000 km2, and consists largely of sand sheet deposits, mostly under three meters thick, stabilized by vegetation, but active SE-NW longitudinal dune ridges make up less than 5% of its area. Evidence of human presence in the STSS in prehispanic times is sparse. Limited archeological investigations have revealed a record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michiel Kappers. Christina Giovas. Claudia Kraan. Kelsey Lowe. Yoshi Maezumi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, the Curaçao Cultural Landscape Project (CCLP) initiated a long-term field investigation on the ecological legacy of Indigenous and European colonial occupation of Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Drawing together multi-proxy records from human settlement, resource use, and environmental conditions over ca. 4500 years, this interdisciplinary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yitzchak Jaffe. Andrew Womack. Dayna Thomas. Anke Hein.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing move toward the use of archaeometric analyses to gain deeper insights into past human realities. In China, this can be seen most prominently in the growing body of research on ancient human-environment interaction by both archaeologists and paleoclimatologists. While interdisciplinary work is crucial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Zych. John Richards.

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. This paper provides a comparative review of the regional chronology, material culture indicators, and environmental data for three site-centered locales (Trempealeau/Fisher Mounds, Fred Edwards, and Aztalan) harboring Middle Mississippian components in southern Wisconsin and the Upper Mississippi River Valley. These data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Youth. Karen Schollmeyer.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project quantitatively investigates the relationship between watershed size and site size within the Gila and Mimbres regions of southwestern New Mexico. Throughout the later first millennium CE, larger sites in these regions tended to occupy areas where smaller tributaries flowed into primary drainage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Gomes. Mussa Raja. Célia Gonçalves. Nuno Bicho. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrasting with other areas of the globe, there are few palaeoenvironmental studies in Africa and in particularly in Mozambique. However, the knowledge about Quaternary palaeoenvironmental changes and their forcers (e.g. climate and sea level changes) is essential to understand the environmental context of human occupation of the Inhambane...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastien Joannin. Amy Cromartie.

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 numerous archaeological discoveries in the Lesser Caucasus document the crucial role that this territory had for humans more than 2 Ma. In particular, the scientific debate has highlighted its strategic position for phases of migration “out of Africa,” and expansion to the Eurasian continent. The role of climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan LeBlanc.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents a survey of the debris flow deposits, hydrology, and agriculture at Tacahuay Tambo, a Late Intermediate (1000-1476 AD) site located on south coast of Peru. Quebrada Tacahuay in combination with the Tambo, has 12,000 years of cultural history. Therefore, there are numerous flood deposits that add to the complexity of the stratigraphy....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I weave together archaeological and historical narratives about two plants in West Africa to explore the pitfalls and potentials of multispecies approaches. I argue that in West Africa, both individual plants and climate change have often been accorded more agentive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Pratt. Gregory Knapp.

This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around AD 600, the Barbacoan speaking peoples of the northern Ecuadorian highlands began building alternating ridge and canal raised field systems. One of the leading hypothesized functions of these raised fields is their role in nutrient cycling. In this scenario,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Daniels. Hector Neff. Heather Thakar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Archaic to Early Formative transition, the Soconusco populations began adopting more sedentary subsistence strategies and investing more in their local environments. Evidence from sediment cores demonstrates that during the Archaic, populations were burning inland landscapes and starting to grow maize. The environmental effects of incipient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized that partnerships with practitioners from allied disciplines enrich our contributions and create many-layered interpretations of the sites and communities we study. Working in the context of climate change, collaborations between archaeologists and...

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 Zachary Boal. Emily Zavodny. Carla Hadden. Sarah Barber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding patterns of localized environmental change in the past can provide valuable insight into modern environmental patterns, as well as comparative options for modern day environmental planning. This research analyzes Donax variabilis associated with the Burns Mound Site (900 to 1600 CE), located on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station along the...

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 Mark Schurr. Terrance Martin. Madeleine McLeester.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The same glacial processes that produced Lake Michigan in midwestern North America also produced numerous wetlands of many types at the southern end of the lake. A diverse wetland matrix of smaller lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens was once found throughout the region. Many of these wetlands have been destroyed or altered by urban...

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 Kimberly Wooten.

This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological site records are a tool for recording not only a site’s cultural constituents—landscapes, features, artifacts, built environment components, etc.—but also a format for documenting any adverse impacts that have occurred to those resources. What if those site record forms...

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 Jada Ko.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extraction and utilization of natural resources often come with an underlying question of sustainability. At present, there are constant debates on and readjustments to how sustainability is measured. One of the biggest challenges is to establish suitable baselines to evaluate the balance between resource economies, resource availability, and...

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 Ashley Kipp. Lindsey Cochran.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sea level rise is a growing threat to cultural heritage resources. Popular geospatial methods to identify at-risk sites work well for large-scale areas but are often overly laborious for the non-specialist to use and challenging to apply at a site-specific scale. Here, we create a Coastal Canopy Health Model, a method used to locate cultural resources in...