Environment and Climate  (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas E. Levy.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ernesto Arredondo. Luke Auld-Thomas.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johan Jarl. Angela Bruch.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Desjardins. Scott Rufolo. Shyong En Pan. Jelke Take.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emuobosa Orijemie.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth. Mario Borrero. Geoffrey Braswell.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Broughton. Elic Weitzel.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Irene Torreggiani. Benjamin Acevedo Peralta. Juan Aguilar. Deyvis Oporta Fonseca. Bastiaan van Dalen.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Allgaier. Brian Codding.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Rose. Kitty Emery. Robert Guralnick.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walls. Mari Kleist. Remi Mereuze. Cecilia Porter.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey. Daria Nikitina. Katherine Dowling.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ayelen Delgado Orellana.

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...

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 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...