Resilience and Sustainability (Other Keyword)
51-68 (68 Records)
As studies of sustainability and resilience in pre-contact Polynesian societies proliferate, records of small-scale and large-scale environmental change are being refined. Yet the question of what drives social change, human actions or climatic factors, is still quite hard to discern. My case study focuses on non-human agency, particularly eroding landforms and climatic conditions, as forces of change in pre-contact East Polynesia. A Society Island case study outlines varied human responses to...
Scylla or Charybdis? Prioritizing the Investigation of Sites Endangered by Natural Hazards (2018)
Maryland has 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline associated with the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and more than 12-percent of its surface area in floodplains. These high risk areas for flooding and coastal erosion contain about 40-percent of Maryland’s archeological sites and presumably many more that have yet to be discovered. It is not feasible or prudent to excavate every endangered site, thus choices about which sites to investigate must be made strategically. This paper lays out a reasoned...
The Socio-Ecological Dynamics of the Uinta Fremont Agricultural Transition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northeastern Utah’s Uinta Basin marks the northernmost extent of maize agriculture diffused from the American Southwest, with as many as a dozen distinct Fremont pithouse communities forming between AD 300-1350. Recent work in the Cub Creek locality of Dinosaur National Monument demonstrates that Fremont...
Space and Time for the Milpa-Forest Garden Cycle: A Model of the Ancient Maya Landscape of El Pilar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a critique of the temperate prejudice of the tropics, we embrace the hypothesis that the Maya forest represents a domesticated landscape to examine the settlement and environmental patterns of the ancient Maya of...
Talking to Our Selves? An Applied Zooarchaeology Citation Analysis (2018)
Applied zooarcheology has been on an apparent upward swing, gaining practitioners and seeing an increasing number of publications in natural science journals. Whether the intended consumers (conservation biologists, land managers) are receiving the message remains uncertain. We used a two-phase process to survey the literature pertaining to applied zooarchaeology: 1) keyword searching for highly cited applied zooarchaeology publications in Google Scholar; and 2) tracking of specific articles...
Taskscapes and Social Sustainability: Archaeobotanical and Ethnohistorical Interpretations from the Chesapeake (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “taskscape,” or a landscape comprised of actions and labor (Ingold 1993, 2000), provides a means for assessing the change and continuity of a place over time. Through the study of plant remains (including macrobotanical remains, phytolith residues, and starch grains), taskscapes from the Late Archaic...
Terminal Classic Practices Reflected in Diet and Geolocation: The B-4 Peri-abandonment Deposit at Xunantunich, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study applies isotopic analyses of carbon (ẟ13Ccoll) and nitrogen (ẟ15Ncoll) from bone collagen, with carbon (ẟ13Cap), oxygen (ẟ18O), and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) to faunal remains excavated from a peri-abandonment deposit at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich during the Terminal Classic period. Peri-abandonment deposits represent a distinct phenomenon in...
There Are Holes in Our Argument: Karst Landforms and Multispecies Flourishing in Northeastern Yucatan, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the...
Tracking Ancient Animals to Provide an Archaeological Perspective on Wild Mammal Management, Conservation and ‘Rewilding’ (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human immigration and biological invasions are high-profile topics in modern politics, but neither are uniquely modern phenomena. Migrations of people, animals and ideas were common in antiquity and are frequently incorporated into expressions of cultural identity. However, the more recent the migration, the more negative modern attitudes are towards them. Native is...
Two Millennia of Resilience: The Old Town Bandon Site on the Oregon Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Old Town Bandon site is a large archaeological site on the Oregon Coast that lies beneath the sidewalks of a settler community. The site has been the subject of over 30 years of archaeological research guided by the Coquille Indian Tribe. This work has revealed the...
Understanding Past Human Securities, Sustainability, and Migration for a Climate-Changing World (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. During the 1200s–1400s CE in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest, tens of thousands of people were on the move—many leaving places where knowledge of landscapes had accrued at the scale of millennia. By the end of the 1400s, population levels had declined by about 50%. What conditions led to this migration and...
Urban growth and land use at Chicoloapan, an Epiclassic town in the southern Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work,...
Using ZooMS to Evaluate Targeted Species Harvest of Pacific Salmon (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 a large estuary off the central coast of eastern Vancouver Island lies a series of fish trap complexes, which were used for catching herring and salmon in the past. Nearby, the large Pentlatch Village site contains the zooarchaeological remains of these harvests and provides an opportunity for researchers to obtain species-level...
The Variable Resilience of Large and Small Holdings on the Svalbard Estate, NE Iceland: A Multidisciplinary Study of Farm Abandonments Circa AD 1300 (2018)
Recent studies have identified an important reorganization of the Svalbarð estate, north-east Iceland around AD 1300. The initial coastal-focused settlement of the region was followed by the founding of new farms in the deep interior. Most were not sustained and some farm sites on the coast were also reduced. Initially, the magnate’s farm of Svalbarð had a herding economy supplemented by fishing while Hjálmarsvík, its coastal neighbor, exploited a diversity of marine resources. Around AD 1300...
When Do We Eat? The Life Cycle of Indigenous Maya Food-Plants and Temporal Implications for Residential Stability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For Maya agriculture, both ancient and modern, it is known that a wide range of time is needed between planting and harvesting of various plant species. While annual crops require less than a year to reach full productivity, perennial crops, particularly tree-crops, might require many years to begin production, and even longer to reach full productivity....
When the Volcano Erupts: Lessons from the Archaeological Record on Human Adaptation to Catastrophic Environments (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do repeated disasters shape and strengthen communities? The Tilarán-Arenal region of Costa Rica is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world, but despite the risk, from the advent of sedentary villages during the Tronodora phase (2000-500 BC) until the arrival of Spanish in the 16th century, people demonstrated remarkable resilience. Using...
Where Did the Fish Go? Use of Archaeological Salmonid Remains to Guide Recovery Efforts in the American West (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the scale of habitat loss from development associated with the Industrial Age, archaeological faunas pre-dating the modern era often represent animal populations extirpated from their former ranges. For example, anadromous salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest of North America have become extirpated from much of their range in the past...
Working, Living, and Dying Together: Rethinking Marginality, Sex, and Heterarchy in Kayenta Communities (AD 900-1150) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pueblo groups living in the Kayenta region of northern Arizona differ remarkably from their contemporaries in adjacent regions. At Mesa Verde and Chaco to the northeast and southeast respectively, there is compelling evidence for rigid hierarchical and political systems of trade, governance, and decision-making that generated...