Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
26-50 (436 Records)
In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...
Archaeological Open Air Hunter-Gatherer Sites in the Serranopolis Region, Brazil: An Interpretation of the Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological region of Serranópolis in Southestern Goias/Brazil stands out for its cultural material in rock shelter sites occupied by groups of hunter-gatheres and agricultural ceramists from 10,400 B.P to 915 B.P. The purpose of this paper is to verify the low frequency and visibility of open air sites, applying variables such as landscape, geology,...
Archaeological Plant Remains from the Lower Xingu (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological excavations at the sites of Jacupí, Carrazedo, and Gurupá in the Lower Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon have implemented a significant program for the recovery of plant remains, resulting in a large archaeobotanical assemblage currently undergoing analysis. Recent...
Archaeological Proxies of Early Modern Human Niche Construction in Northern Malawi (2019)
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...
Archaeological Sites and Flooding in the Diquís Delta, Southeastern Costa Rica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interaction between ancient societies and their natural environment was one of the topics discussed by Richard G. Cooke for southern Central America. We focus on the Diquis Delta, Costa Rica, an alluvial plain formed by the Térraba and Sierpe...
Archaeology and the Colorado River: Environment and Cultural Management (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Work by Chronicle Heritage" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A rafting expedition covering a 17-mile stretch of the Colorado River in the McInnis Canyons Recreation Area revealed an invasive takeover of cheatgrass across adjacent canyons, once filled with bunchgrass and sagebrush during a previous survey conducted in the 1970s for cattle grazing. This presentation explores the dynamic relationship...
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...
Archaic Ingenuity through Continuous Change (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic groups worldwide are often categorized as less technically and culturally developed. However, their deep understanding of nature and their environment and ability to translate this knowledge to adapt to new circumstances proves otherwise. Paleoclimatic research in...
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...
Assessing predictability of dam effects at archaeological sites using long-term repeat lidar surveys (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th 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...