Resilience and Sustainability (Other Keyword)
26-50 (68 Records)
Solomon Butcher was a citizen photographer smitten with what he referred to as the "history project," to photodocument the citizens of Custer County, Nebraska as the frontier receded further west. From 1886-1892, he imaged perhaps one third of the occupants, staging them in front of occupied or recently abandoned sod houses and making them party to his commemoration of a constructed pioneer heritage. When severe droughts hit in the mid-1890s, did this shared pioneer "can-do" heritage sustain...
In a Shade of Colonial Expansion: The Subsistence Strategies and Consumption Practices in Black Star Canyon, Southern California (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. Puhu (Ca-Ora-132), a Native American settlement located in the Santa Ana mountains of California, has been remembered as a unique place of conflict centered around animal utilization. In 1831, Puhu was attacked and defeated by American fur trappers after the...
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Sustainable Oyster Harvesting Practices during the Woodland and Protohistoric Periods in the Lower Chesapeake Bay (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2021, an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, marine biologists, and geologists was formed to answer the question: is it possible to infer which part of the estuary an oyster was harvested from based on morphology and bioindicators observed on archaeological shell? In the Lower Chesapeake Bay, there are three “zones” conducive to oyster growth—the...
Investigating Ancient Maya Resiliency at Xunantunich, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite more than a century of intensive archaeological research, factors leading to the Classic Maya Collapse continue to be debated by Maya archaeologists. This presentation discusses the Classic Maya Collapse and its effects on the people of Xunantunich, Belize. Investigations from the 2018 field season, carried out by the Belize Valley Archaeological...
Landscape and Plant Use in High Albania: New Results from the Late Neolithic to Iron Age at Gajtan and Zagorës (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2013 – 2015, the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (PASH) conducted a regional surface survey and targeted excavation at several settlement and tumulus sites in the Shkodër province of northern Albania. Two of these settlement sites, Gajtan and Zagorës, are fortified hilltop sites that preserved intact deposits with well-preserved macrobotanical remains...
Late Precolumbian Subsistence Change, Socio-political Transformation, and Ethnogenesis in the Upper Illinois River 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. Post-AD 1000 was a time of tremendous change in the Upper Illinois River valley. The Terminal Late Woodland groups in the region were bordered on the south by emergent Mississippian petty chiefdoms of the Central Illinois River valley, on the north by Oneota and Mississippian societies, and on the east by Fort Ancient...
Life after Teotihuacan: Everyday Practices and Community Formation at Chicoloapan, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Epiclassic period (550–850 CE) in central Mexico is widely viewed by archaeologists as a time of instability, violent conflict, and large-scale migration. The collapse of Teotihuacan left a fractious and decentralized sociopolitical landscape in its wake—a situation that contrasted starkly...
“Like Mushrooms after Rain”: Learning the Land on the Late Nineteenth-Century Central Great Plains (USA) (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. After the Civil War, settlers moved into a Great Plains landscape from which Native Americans had been extirpated; i.e., a foreign land with few local experts. In the case of late nineteenth-century Custer County, Nebraska, settler towns sprang up and disappeared “like mushrooms after rain.” Settlers initially sought out...
Local Trajectories, Regional Patterns, and Human Ecodynamics in Northern Māori Fisheries (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological fishbone assemblages are the product of dynamic interactions between human fishers and fish stocks, both of which are enmeshed in broader, dynamic socioenvironmental contexts which are continually transformed and sustained by people and non-human entities. Understanding the history of fisheries therefore depends on careful consideration of...
Maize, Construction, and Population Changes: One Way to Identify Sunk Cost Behaviors in Central Mesa Verde (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When the environment changes, sedentary people choose whether to stay and invest more in their current adaptive strategy, or abandon their land and residence to go somewhere with greater opportunities. For a well-understood portion of the upland US Southwest we ask: when the maize niche shrinks, do people continue investing...
Mapping Bison: Oral Traditions from Picuris Pueblo, NM, on Bison Procurement (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster explores resilience and survivance of important animal-human economic, spiritual, and cultural traditions through the geospatial lens by mapping and describing ethnographic and archaeological interactions with Bison bison and Picuris Pueblo in the long term. In the Puebloan world, bison-human interactions are constrained by geographic and later...
Matacanela in Its Regional and Cultural Context (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. In this presentation I synthesize recent studies that the Matacanela Archaeological Project has produced as a way of situating the presentations in this session within their broader temporal and spatial contexts, both with the Tuxtlas and the broader Gulf lowlands. One notable aspect...
Modeling Hazard Risk, Vulnerability, Recovery, and Adaptation in Tilarán-Arenal, Costa Rica: An Integrative Approach to Disaster Studies (2018)
The Tilarán -Arenal region of Costa Rica is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world. Despite the inherent hazard, people have occupied this region since the Paleo-Indian period (7000 B.C.). Numerous studies have explored volcanic eruptions as forcing mechanism that lead to culture; however, starting with the advent of sedentary villages during the Tronodora phase (2000-500 B.C.) until the arrival of Spanish in the 16th century, people maintained relatively small-scale,...
Modeling of the Impacts and Sustainability of Ancient Maya Hunting: An Interdisciplinary Ecological and Archaeological Study (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The environmental impact of sizable Late Classic ancient Maya populations remains a persistent question in archaeology. To date, studies of ancient Maya environmental impacts have focused primarily on land-cover change and the conversion of forest to agricultural fields, orchards, and habitation areas. In contrast, few empirical studies have focused on the...
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...
Monkeys and the Maya: Zooarchaeological Analysis at Isla Civlituk, Campeche, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my thesis, I examined the primate remains, Ateles geoffroyi and Allouata pigra, found at Isla Cilvituk, Campeche, Mexico, to understand the agricultural and sustainability practices of the Postclassic period (AD 1200–1525) in this area. I weigh evidence of contemporary human-primate relationships in the Maya region to understand continuity...
Natural Disasters and the Avoidance of Complexity: Arenal Villages in Comparative Context (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small sedentary villages were established by about 4,000 years ago in the Arenal area of Costa Rica. The egalitarian nature of internal organization continued until the Spanish conquest, with no evidence of significant inequality developing, socially, economically, religiously, or politically. However, they were subjected to...
Rates of Change in Radiocarbon Date Frequencies and Population Collapse (2018)
Recent analyses of large samples of radiocarbon dates shows a change in radiocarbon date frequencies between 3000 BP and 800 BP. There is either an exponential or super-exponential increase in radiocarbon date frequencies followed by a sudden decline. The goal of this poster is to test a population ecology model as to whether or not the degree of population overshoot can predict the degree of population collapse. We want to analyze if the rate of increase in radiocarbon date frequencies over...
Reconstructing a Maya Agricultural Wetland on the Rio Bravo Floodplain, Northwestern Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Birds of Paradise wetlands have been a subject of recent intensive study within Northwestern Belize. We now recognize this fluviokarst wetland has undergone extensive modification of field building and channelization during the Maya Classic (1650-1050 BP) with use possibly extending into the early Maya Postclassic (1050-700...
Reconstructing the Ancient Maya Wetland Fields of the Central Rio Bravo, 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. Lidar acquired in 2016 in northwest Belize revealed an expanse of ~7 km2 of ancient Maya raised fields and canals along the Rio Bravo floodplain near the ancient Maya site of Wari Camp. This is half of all the wetland field area found from lidar in this region. Excavations and multiproxy data provide the first...
Resilience and the Record: Suggestions for Application of Resilience Concepts to Archaeological Cases (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts from resilience theory (RT) have been variously applied in studies of the deep human past. Given emphasis on cross-scale interactions and cyclical trajectories, RT provides a framework to interpret historical sequences in terms of general ecological processes. However, less consideration has been given to the interface between the trajectories of...
Resilience Theory and Human-Environment Interactions during the Early Holocene at Lothagam-Lokam, Northern Kenya (2018)
The pluvial conditions during the African Humid Period of the Early-to-Mid Holocene profoundly influenced environments across northern and eastern Africa, expanding lakes, rivers, and grassland ecologies. Archaeologists have often explained human responses to these increasingly aquatic environment as in terms of an increasing reliance on fisher-hunter-gatherer economies. Similarly, once the AHP ended, humans abandoned these lifeways. These perspectives are overly deterministic; in this paper, we...
Resource Use and Sustainability of the Gila’s South Diamond Creek Pueblo (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness are the names ascribed to rich mountainous land spanning between western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. This land was once home to the people of the Mimbres culture. The environments within the Gila vary due to different...
Risk Management in Agriculturally Marginal Areas of Southwestern Anatolia during the Ottoman Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The results of recent surveys around the Mediterranean have revealed a wealth of information about rural populations during the Ottoman period that had for a long time been ignored by historical and archaeological research. This has also brought to light the role of people who occupy politically, economically, or socially marginal niches. This paper aims to...
The Role of Diet Diversity and Breadth in the Maya “Collapse” (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Debate has surrounded the Terminal Classic (AD 750–900/1000) Maya “collapse,” a period when the Classic period political structure deteriorated and parts of the southern lowlands were depopulated. While these changes were the result of various developments including warfare, social unrest, environmental degradation, and climate change, one...