Environment and Climate  (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Bocinsky. Andrew Gillreath-Brown. Tim Kohler.

This is an abstract from the "Adopting the Pueblo Fettle: The Breadth and Depth of the Basketmaker III Cultural Horizon" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we explore the emergence of the first Pueblo Canon — how the period of initial Pueblo exploration in the northern upland Southwest coalesced into the suite of material and social patterns archaeologists readily identify as Basketmaker III. Steadfast development of temperate maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Lebenzon. Elic Weitzel. Isaac A. Hart. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recognizing how climate variability altered the landscape in regards to nutrient availability is a key aspect in reconstructing how prehistoric peoples were able to thrive. Further, understanding how past climate and environmental change affected organisms is important for predicting the role of imminent future climate change on populations today. Previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorenzo Castellano. Roderick Campbell. Yitzchak Jaffe.

In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Yoder. James Allison. Scott Ure. Haylie Ferguson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coal Bed Village (42SA920), located at the confluence of Coal Bed and Montezuma Canyons, is one of the largest Ancestral Pueblo sites in the state of Utah. The site was first documented by William Henry Jackson in 1875, but has never been systematically investigated. Rubble mounds covering the top, slope, and alluvial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Ostahowski.

This presentation examines the effects of land loss to the coastal archaeological record. Impacts observable at different scales (coast-wide, regional, and the individual archaeological site) demonstrate that our ability to understand Louisiana's past may be permanently altered. New directions for future research and community engagement are proposed.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tony Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work adds collagen δ15N and δ13C to the apatite δ13C and δ18O values previously presented by the author, as well as C:N ratios demonstrating the viability of many samples from Hell Gap. Bison bone can be found throughout Paleoindian deposits at the site, providing a possible proxy for regional climate change. Carbon ratios for collagen samples (n=23)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Briggs. Xinyuan Zheng. John L. III Berini. Edward P. Fleming.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Strontium and oxygen isotopes preserved within plant and animal remains reflect the regional geology and environment where they originated. This approach relies on a regional map of baseline isotope values – or isoscape – to link values preserved in remains with a region of origin. Mechanistic models, which estimate baseline 87Sr/86Sr based on age and type...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Lulewicz. Victor Thompson. William Marquardt. Karen Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present current research at the Pineland Site Complex (8LL33, etc.), a large shell midden-mound site in southwestern Florida occupied by the Calusa from around AD 50 up to historic contact. This well-preserved and well-studied archaeological site provides new insights into the relationship between subsistence practices of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Watterson.

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. Archaeological visualization—the task of picturing the past in the present—exists at the intersections of data collection, interpretation, local perspectives, and artfully crafted storytelling. This type of science communication and public engagement work forms a core dimension of archaeology today, particularly for projects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ardern Hulme-Beaman. Thomas Cucchi. Jeremy Searle. Keith Dobney.

Humans have a dramatic impact on environments around them. They augment, manipulate and engineer local environments to their own benefit, often resulting in a concentration of easily available food and nest sites. These anthropogenic resources and environments are readily exploited by a myriad of other organisms. These organisms, in local and neighbouring environments, engage in a range of different relationships with humans, reflecting the level of interaction and dependence. Due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iride Tomazic.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetlands are valuable ecosystems for many animal species, but they also present critical ecosystems for humans. By protecting against floods, erosion and improving water quality, wetlands present a valuable source for human food procurement and activities. In this paper, I exemplify the role of wetlands from the Southern Carpathian Basin by presenting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Kelley. Guangmau Xie. Qiang Lin. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main questions in human evolution concerns the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia. Given the current tropical environment of South China, we may wonder whether early modern humans entering this region could penetrate the rainforest to forage for food, and indeed whether the environment in this area was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Brokaw. Sheila Ward.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some archaeologists believe that a key to the success of ancient Maya civilization was sophisticated tailoring of agriculture and forestry to varied environments. Some archaeologists and ecologists also think that ancient forestry is reflected in the tree species composition of modern forests. Based on studies in northwest Belize we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarina Jerbic.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on a PhD research case study in the Croatian Adriatic, the paper demonstrates a step further into investigating coastal and submerged archaeology. Seabed mapping methods adopted from marine geology, such as side-scan and multi-beam sonar surveys and shallow water sub-bottom profiling are now...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Smith. Colin Grier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salish Sea is a region speckled with coastal shell mounds. Often these places are the remnants of winter villages occupied over generations. Mounds were built with intention and foresight to leach nutrients into the surrounding ecosystem, sustaining the environment for generations. Millennia ago, Indigenous peoples understood through transgenerational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Warner. Aleksa Alaica.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The influences of climate and human activity on archaeomalacological assemblages can be difficult to disentangle. We compare Early Horizon (EH; 800–200 BC) and Middle Horizon (MH; AD 600–1000) *Donax obesulus size, age estimates, and paleoclimate data. *D. obesulus is a short-lived (<5 years) intertidal clam common in archaeological and modern contexts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ani St. Amand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Kintigh. Jeffrey Altschul.

Archaeological forays into the climate change debate have generally been through case studies that integrate archaeological, anthropological, and paleoenvironmental data into coherent, evidence-based narratives that document how cultural systems in a relatively small geographic region adapted to long-term climatic change. While these cautionary tales can play a valuable role in galvanizing public opinion, they generally have not influenced public policy. What is lacking are scalable inferences...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Whitaker.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is widely acknowledged that fire was used throughout the western United States as a landscape management tool. Direct archaeological evidence is rare and successful studies that identify Native American burning rely on multidisciplinary approaches. One such study in California by Lightfoot,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gentaro Miyano. Mario Rivera.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ramaditas, a Formative village site dated to around 600 BC, is located in the driest section of the Atacama Desert. Surrounding the architectural structures is a large area of fields that were cultivated by the inhabitants of Ramaditas. Here we present aspects concerning the water system developed at Ramaditas based on an aerial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Pacheco. Shelby M. Patrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-animal relations are inherently dynamic in nature and, in recent years, archaeologists have started to explore alternative approaches to shed light on anomalous patterns that deviate from traditional models of understanding. Archaeologists traditionally assumed that they could account for cultural differences globally by employing western divisions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julieta Flores-Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Mesoamerican worldview, maize is synonymous with the body and represents the primary food of the human being, accompanied by a complex planting system known as milpa. Said system, we believe, celebrates the interrelation between the diversity of species, serving, in this way, as a metaphor to understand our social construction. In this metaphor,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Soto. Siobhan Clarke. Jamie Inwood. Patrick Roberts. Julio Mercader.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During dental calculus formation, mineralization preserves microbotanical remains. These provide paleoenvironmental and dietary information. However, modern contaminants on archaeological samples overlap with target species thus necessitating decontamination procedures. We present an efficient protocol to avoid the presence of contaminants: a) testing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Damick.

Archaeology has engaged with ecology in various ways over the years. Recently, post-humanist thinking has gained popularity as an approach, urging us to think about human and non-humans relationally, as having contingent qualities that vary in relation to their interaction over time. Simultaneously, we see increasing attempts to think with indigenous philosophies and descendent communities about what the environment is and does. However, there remains a disconnect between approaches that seek to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Roos. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...