Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
251-275 (436 Records)
A decade ago, we suggested that the low frequency of archaeological sites dated from the mid-Holocene in several portions of Lowland South America (what we have called the "Archaic Gap") was due to an increase in the magnitude of dry periods. Since then, data regarding paleoenvironmental reconstructions for Lowland South America, coupled with an increase of the archaeological knowledge, allows us to reassess the idea of the "Archaic Gap" and redefine both the areal extent of the phenomenon and...
Mammalian Enamel Stable Isotopic (δ13C, δ18O) Evidence for Environmental Change during the MSA-LSA Transition at the Kisese II Rockshelter, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental perturbations are invoked as an influence of hominin speciation, dispersal and technological innovations. Archaeological occurrences preserving the transition from the Middle Stone Age to the Later Stone Age are critical to gauging environmental influences of human adaptations, yet there is a dearth of well-dated sites in eastern Africa. The...
Managing the Effects of Erosion and Sea Level Rise on Archaeological Sites at Fort Eustis, Newport News, Virginia (2018)
Fort Eustis, part of Joint Base Langley-Eustis, located on Mulberry Island along the James River in Virginia, is extremely vulnerable to the threat of erosion resulting from sea level rise, increased tidal range, and flooding from increased rainfall and storm surge. Currently, dozens of archaeological sites on the island are experiencing damage resulting from erosion, including sites where human remains have been found protruding from erosional scarps. To meet the installation’s short and...
Many Communities, Many Foods: The Economic and Political Implications of Diversified Cropping Strategies before, during, and after Urbanism in Northwest India ca. 3200–1500 BC (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate crises are raising questions about how we feed everyone in our highly urbanized modern society. Anthropological research has demonstrated that economic, political, and environmental landscapes are intricately interwoven and intersect with the diverse choices of people across all scales of society. Nowhere is this...
Mapping Prehistoric Behavior Patterns at a Lithic Tool Stone Source in the Colorado Desert: Results of Geospatial Analysis at CA-IMP-008/H (2018)
Mapping Prehistoric Behavior Patterns at a Lithic Tool Stone Source in the Colorado Desert: Results of Geospatial Analysis at CA-IMP-008/H This paper sets out results obtained following a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of the spatial patterning of stone tools at a study area in the Colorado Desert of southern California. Stone tools are examined based on their utility for an explanation of their use and importance in the lives of prehistoric foragers. Current efforts to...
Marginality and Opportunity in the Deserts of Chicama, Peru: Perspectives from Integrated Archaeology, Remote Sensing, and Paleoclimatic Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Broad regions of Peru’s coastal desert are now highly adverse marginal environments, yet archaeological evidence indicate these settings often were used extensively in the past. Using a time-series analysis of Sentinel 1 and 2 remote sensing data, we document surface and groundwater resources that developed in the normally hyperarid desert margins of the...
A Meaningful Anthropocene?: Golden Spikes, Transitions, and Boundary Objects (2018)
Despite opposition by a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and other historical and social scientists, a proposal to designate a geologic epoch of humans, the Anthropocene, is moving forward with a proposed starting date sometime in the last 50 years. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and other, mostly, geological scientists have focused on the stratigraphic signatures for the boundary marker in lieu of understanding the long-term processes that have resulted in human...
Megafauna 101 for Archaeologists (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene... basically a no-man's land that is trapped between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period. For American archaeologists, these animals are sometimes too old to be considered as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and, by some...
Melting Ice, High-Altitude Hunting, and Horse Use in the Mongolian Altai (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the globe, a rapidly warming climate is exposing organic materials preserved in permanent snow and ice features. In western Mongolia, artifacts melting from ice features in the Altai mountains demonstrate a millennia-long record of the use of high-altitude zones for hunting of...
Mesodesma donacium as a Paleoclimatic Archive on the Coast of Peru (2018)
Quebrada Jaguay is one of the earliest maritime settlements in the New World. The southern Peruvian coastal site was occupied from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene ~13 to 8 ka and demonstrates a society highly dependent upon marine resources. Archaeological deposits excavated in the 1990’s and 2017 contained high volumes of marine faunal remains, predominantly the surf clam Mesodesma donacium, which accounts for 99% of the shell remains. M. donacium are used in this study to...
Micro-remains in Sediment as Indicators of Human Activity (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant microfossil analysis has been utilized for environmental reconstruction at numerous archaeological sites around the world; however, the process of preparing and examining samples is labor intensive, requiring skill and a large investment of time in order to manually obtain sufficient count numbers. Furthermore, observations based on microfossil...
Migration, Population Change, and Climate at Cahokia (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. In this paper we explore sociopolitical, economic, and climatological aspects of the population history of Cahokia and compare these with the timing of the appearance of Cahokia materials at hinterland sites to better understand some of the factors that may have contributed to the migration of people out of the American...
A Model of the Extinct Palaeo-Agulhas Plain Ecosystem in Southernmost Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...
Modeling Regional-Scale Vulnerabilities to Drought through Least Cost Analyses: An Archaeological Case Study from the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a new approach for identifying archaeological proxies for community vulnerabilities to climate change: least cost analyses of water acquisition costs from archaeological sites to water. By automating the least cost analysis through a custom Python script in ArcGIS Pro, we modeled the 1-way cost for water acquisition...
Modeling the Changes in the Surface Processes at Arslantepe (Malatya) during the Early Bronze Age-I (ca. 5000–4750 cal. BP) (2018)
Agent-based modeling of land use not only illustrates how ancient production mechanisms evolve, but such models also have the power to reconstruct changes in spatio-temporal changes in the dynamics of surface processes in relation with the changes in climatic conditions and varying type and intensity of human land use. Early Bronze Age-I at Arslantepe represents a time period when the paleoclimatic dynamics changed towards more arid conditions while the economy of the site shifted from intensive...
Modeling the Impact of Anthropogenic Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge on Coastal Archaeological Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes the impact of projected sea-level rise as a result of anthropogenic climate change on coastal archaeological sites in the state of Georgia. Coastal sites and environments are at increasing risk of erosion, inundation, and submersion due to projected sea level rise of 0.25-0.30 meters by 2050 and up to 2.1 meters by 2100, along with...
Molecular and Isotopic Analyses of Charred and Uncharred Sediments: Investigating Environmental Signatures at the Middle Palaeolithic Rock Shelter of Abric del Pastor (Alcoy, Spain) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of Late Pleistocene Neanderthal habitats is largely based on anthracological and palynological reconstructions set within broader global climatic frameworks. This approach has yielded important environmental information, however, so far it has not been possible to identify fluctuations in climate or...
Mountain, Steppes, and Barley: GIS Modeling of Human Environmental Interactions In the Armenian Highlands during the Bronze and Iron Ages (2018)
This poster investigates how Bronze and Iron Age communities around Mount Aragats, in central Armenia, managed their grassland environment through their subsistence strategies. I suggest that these distinct social and political societies not only participated in constructing a landscape of domestic cereal grains, such as barley and wheat, but also were participants in the ecology of this open mountain steppe environment dominated by Poaceae, Chenopodiaceae, and Artemisia. I investigate how the...
Mountains of Manure: Assessing the Botanical Potential of South Indian Neolithic Ashmounds (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic of southern India is notable for features known as Ashmounds, large accumulations of fired and often vitrified cattle dung. First described in the late nineteenth century, the dung-based composition of these impressive features was clearly established by the mid-twentieth century. To date, however, no...
Moving Beyond: Using Methods of Assessing Holocene Environmental Change in Northwestern Guyana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To assess Holocene dietary changes we conducted isotopic analysis of human and faunal remains from seven shell mounds in Northwestern Guyana. We used stable carbon 13C and oxygen 18O isotope compositions data to assess the degree of dietary constancy as a proxy for determining the likelihood of there being any...
Multiple Ways of Understanding Peru’s Changing Climate: Bridging Ethnographic, Archaeological, and Other Scientific Perspectives in Student Learning (2018)
This paper discusses the importance of combining ethnographic, archaeological, and "hard" scientific knowledge when teaching about climate change. Archaeology courses that discuss climate change typically bring together data from the physical sciences, such as from ice or lake cores, with archaeological evidence of social change, such as shifting settlement patterns or food strategies. Though an understanding of these links is critical to scientific literacy and knowledge about the past, we...
A Multiproxy Approach to Refining a Sediment Core Chronology with Data from Multiple Sites in the Western Lake Bonnevilel Basin, USA (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a novel approach to developing a unified radiocarbon-based chronology for multiple sediment cores from a location where radiocarbon dating is challenging. We used 36 radiocarbon ages from eight terminal Pleistocene and Holocene sediment cores with correlated stratigraphies. Stratigraphic correlation was accomplished using a combination of...
NASA's Contributions to Remote Sensing in Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than four decades, NASA has played an outsized role in advancing the use of satellite imagery for archaeological applications. Starting in the 1980s, NASA archaeologist Dr. Tom Sever organized the first conference on archaeological applications of remote sensing, infusing NASA Earth Observations into cutting-edge archaeological research being...
Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans in Western Iberia: Diet and Ecology at Lapa do Picareiro (Central Portugal) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Iberia, potentially the last place where Neanderthals survived, the demographic breakdown of small, loosely connected populations seems to have been a significant driver for their demise. Human responses to the climatic fluctuations of the Late Pleistocene, particularly Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3, could be an...
Neanderthals in Porto Selvaggio, Southern Italy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Peninsular Southern Europe Refugia during the Middle Paleolithic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Porto Selvaggio of southern Italy is where the Uluzzian culture was first identified and documented, providing key insights into the transition of the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic. The area has also yielded evidence of continuous Neanderthal occupations spanning MIS 5-3. Situated in the Natural Park of Porto Selvaggio,...