Environment and Climate (Other Keyword)
51-75 (436 Records)
For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
Carbon Enamel Isotopes as Proxy for Dietary Changes in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2 and 1.4 Ma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...
Carbon Legacies of Dryland Agricultural Features in the Ancient Southwest (2018)
This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis of soil organic carbon measurements associated with pre-Columbian dryland agricultural fields in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In aggregate, rock alignments and terraces are associated with significantly higher organic carbon concentrations, and this effect is pronounced in sandy parent material. The results support a hypothesis that resource conserving features constructed by indigenous farmers continue to influence the ecology...
Carbonized Wood Remains from the Matacanela Site, Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper describes the carbonized wood remains recovered from fifty-five heavy fractions of flotation from seven units and fifty light fractions of flotation from six units collected during the excavations of the Matacanela Site in Veracruz, Mexico. Environmental comparisons are...
Chacoan Outlier Depopulation and 12th Century Arroyo Cutting near Zuni Salt Lake, New Mexico (2018)
Depopulation of Chacoan outlier settlements in the Cibola culture area near Zuni Salt Lake ~AD 1130 has been attributed to the onset of a persistent 50-year drought. Prior alluvial stratigraphy studies concluded that arroyo formation near these settlements occurred two centuries after this exodus and therefore was not a contributing factor. The present study used a larger sample of radiocarbon dates, including short-lived, charred plant material from alluvial contexts and tree-rings from several...
Challenges for Archaeologists: A Changing Climate Is Only One Development (2018)
There is general awareness among cultural heritage professionals, including archaeologists, that a drastically changing climate requires re-examination of our responsibilities and practices for identifying, documenting and managing sites and objects. The occurrence and effects of phenomena such as warming temperatures, sea-level rise, desertification, violent storms, and flooding, are frequently discussed. However, the socio-economic ramifications of a changing climate and severe weather events,...
Classic Maya Agriculture and Traditional Milpa-Cycle Practices in the Upper Belize River Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic Maya polities of the Upper Belize River Valley were situated in an especially rich alluvial environment, which may have served as a breadbasket for surrounding regions. The region was also one of the most densely settled regions of the Maya lowlands, showing evidence of...
Climate and Cultural Responses in Belizean Prehistory (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 25 years, numerous paleoclimate studies have been published across the Maya Lowlands, providing the climatic context for cultural change from Preclassic through modern times. Increasing archaeological studies have followed suit by documenting cultural...
Climate and Human Behavior Studies for our Warming World: An Introduction to the Models, Methods, and Data (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides a practical introduction and toolkit for investigating relationships between climate and human behavior. The urgency of addressing the problems of our warming world is beyond the responsibility or exclusive domain of climate scientists or specialists – it is a shared human responsibility. Public or scholarly contributions do not...
Climate Change Adaptation: Implementing Indigenous and Local Knowledge to Increase Community Resilience (2018)
Community resilience can be enhanced by engaging local and indigenous groups in the management of their cultural resources, both intangible and tangible. Many communities in developing nations were formally subjected to colonial governance, which imposed foreign architectural designs, irrigation agriculture and economic crops—and these systems vastly changed the social-cultural dynamics of these communities, often destabilizing systems that had been in place for generations. After colonial...
Climate Change and Archaeological Research: An Analysis of NSF-Funded Archaeological Research Projects (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the current climate crisis intensifies, requests for proposals of grant funding related to solutions addressing these issues have increased. For over a decade, there has been a push to integrate archaeology into conversations about climate change (Van de Noort 2011). In this poster, I analyze how archaeologists engage with questions related to climate...
Climate Change and Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This contribution will discuss the relationship between climate change research in archaeology and its application in the heritage management sector, museums, education, and policies. We will do so within a global framework of past climate change action in intergovernmental panels,...
Climate Change and Environment in Cahokia’s History (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists, particularly in the southeast, have often looked to the environment and climate change to understand the evolution of past societies. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation have been implicated in the rise and fall of societies, especially Mississippian period societies like the city of Cahokia. Despite calls...
Climate Change and Rural Livelihood in Calabria, Italy (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how human activity, climate systems, ecosystems, and earth surface processes interact to change the capacity for different human livelihoods over time is crucial to finding livable strategies for coping with...
Climate Change and the Foraging-Farming Transition on the Great Plains (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. The foraging lifestyle persisted as the major human subsistence strategy worldwide for most of the human career. With notable exceptions, this way of life was eventually replaced by a subsistence base complemented and often dominated by cultivated foods. Archaeologists have proposed several hypotheses to explain this...
Climate Change and the Rapid Loss of Organic Deposits in West Greenland (2018)
The REMAINS (REsearch and Management of Archaeological sites IN a changing environment and Society) of Greenland project has explored a number of factors that currently threaten Greenland’s archaeological landscape in the coming decades. This paper reviews recent work as well as the problems and threats to coastal and inland middens along the country’s West coast and adjacent inner fjord systems. Information gathered in recent years provides a baseline for "ground-truthing" predictive models of...
Climate Change Has a History and Landscape Learning Is One of Its Storytellers (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Development of the landscape learning model began more than 20 years ago as part of my work to find ways to use the past to help address modern environmental problems. Combining initial work with nineteenth-century gold rush miners in Wyoming with models of Paleoindian colonization and assemblages led to the hypothesis that...
Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Sites of the Middle Atlantic Uplands (U.S.) (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. At first glance, the archaeological resources of the uplands of the North American Middle Atlantic region are much less vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than are tidal or coastal sites. However, as the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, archaeological sites of...
Climate Change Intensifies Violence in the South Central Andean Highlands, 1.5–0.5 ka (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of the pre-Columbian Andes provides an ideal study of the range of human responses to climate change given the region’s extreme climatic variability, excellent archaeological preservation, and robust paleoclimate records. We evaluate the effects of climate change on the frequency of interpersonal violence in the south central Andes from 470...
Climate Change or Muslims? Collapse of the Late Antique Sasanian Settlements, Mughan Steppe, Iranian Azerbaijan (2018)
Recent research in the borderlands has increased our knowledge on the irrigation systems and urbanization plans of the Sasanian Empire in the late antiquity. In particular, surveys and excavations in the Mughan Steppe indicate that irrigation canals connected nearly all Sasanian settlements. Evidence suggests that after the 7th century AD most of the elaborate settlement system was abandoned and its irrigation infrastructure went out of use. While the exact date of this abandonment is unclear,...
Climate Change, Disease, and the Collapse of Swahili Urbanism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex city-states arose on the East African Coast that were hubs of international trade networks. However, by the seventeenth century, most of these settlements had been abandoned. What were the causes of the Swahili state collapse? Historians and archaeologists have implicated climate change as one of the causal factors in the collapse of highly...
Climate Change, Population Migration, and Ritual Continuity in the Lower Mississippi Valley (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. Tree-ring reconstructions of cool- and warm-season moisture reveal several multi-decadal droughts that impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to the regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Cairo Lowland and adjacent areas...
Climate Change, Sustainability, and the Ancient City of Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The societal impact of climate change in Central Mexico during the Postclassic Period is an important question in Mesoamerican archaeology. Here, using archaeological evidence from the ancient city of Angamuco, including LiDAR analysis, I argue that an engineered environment buffered the environment from reduced rainfall...
Climate Stability and Societal Decline on the Margins of the Byzantine Empire in the Negev Desert (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of a high-resolution climate archive in Negev Desert, southern Israel, it has been challenging to understand why the Byzantine Empire built large towns in this arid region in the fourth century CE—and why it abandoned them three centuries later. In this study, we use dietary and mobility patterns of animals recovered from three Byzantine Negev...