Environmental Archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-25 (45 Records)
This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relationships of people with their land over time leaves visible and invisible traces. As archaeologists we are confronted with landscapes that are the resulting accumulation of these traces over time, such that they may no longer resemble the place that people of the past interacted with. Place is not just a geographic...
The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring our Understanding of Socio-Environmental History (2017)
Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. In this paper, we argue that strident debate about the Anthropocene’s chronological boundaries arises because its formal periodization necessarily forces an arbitrary break in a long history of human alteration of environments. The aim of dividing geologic time based on a "step-change" in the global significance of socio-environmental processes goes directly against the socially differentiated and...
Behavioral Metallurgy of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Neo-Punic Peoples (2015)
Some cultures do not just adopt or develop innovative technologies, but actually define themselves based on their technological acumen. The Phoenicians were such a culture, whose economic reliance on metallurgical and maritime knowledge went further in defining their long-term communal cohesion than did other factors. Lacking historical texts written by Phoenicians, it is only through archaeology and archaeometric analyses that such a resource-based ideology can be reconstructed. Compositional...
Both local and lointain: Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the îlot des Palais site, Quebec City. (2018)
A decade of environmental and palaeoecological research at the îlot des Palais or Intendant’s Palace site in Quebec City has yielded rich and detailed datasets that document the site’s transformation from a marshy riverside setting to an important hive of activity for Intendants, artisans and occupants. The methods presented in this paper include archaeoentomology, zooarchaeology, dendrochronology and macrobotanical analyses. They demonstrate that products imported from the metropole and within...
'Bugs in Eagle Cave, Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Texas' (2015)
The desiccating conditions in desert caves provide a unique opportunity for detailed research on organic materials. Previous examples of insect studies from the desert edge in Egypt, from Akhenaten’s city at Amarna, have indicated the potential of research with fossil insects, both for understanding environmental change and the nature of agriculture, and also for evidence of the early biogeography of insect borne diseases. However, there is limited information on hunter gatherer societies and ...
California’s Channel Islands as a Model System for Understanding the Historical Ecology of Islands (2016)
Islands around the world have served as important model systems for understanding a host of cultural and environmental issues. Here we synthesize our long-term research program on the historical ecology and archaeology of California’s Channel Islands. Drawing on zooarchaeological, paleoethnobotanical, genetic, stable isotope, and other datasets we document a 13,000 year sequence of human environmental interactions from coastal foragers to early historical ranchers and modern conservationists....
Caribbean Anthropogenic Paleozoogeography: Cultural and Ecological Significance of Animal Introductions in the Lesser Antilles (2016)
Studies of exotic animal introductions in the insular Caribbean have focused on the paleozoogeography, origin, and dispersal patterns of these taxa, but have yet to resolve a number of important, related issues. Among these are the critical problems of distinguishing live introductions from the import of animal parts and assessing the degree of animal management practiced by Amerindians. These questions are fundamental to understanding the broader cultural and ecological significance of faunal...
Comparative Ecodynamics of North Atlantic Islands: A progress report (2016)
Support from US, Canadian, Scandinavian, and UK funding bodies 2007-16 has made possible a sustained multi-investigator multi-regional interdisciplinary series of investigations of the offshore islands of the North Atlantic (Faroes, Iceland, Greenland) coordinated by the NABO research cooperative. These islands were connected by Viking Age migrations from mainland Scandinavia and the British Isles, and the diverse fates of their human populations during the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods...
Delores Archaeological Program: Studies in Environmental Archaeology (1980)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Environmental Archaeology in the Caribbean Islands: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Past Human-Environment Dynamics across Time and Space (2016)
Environmental Archaeology is a diverse field that focuses on the inherent relationships between past people and the physical environments in which they lived. Archaeologists employ traces of past human behavior and cultural practices in their macro-, micro-, geo- and biochemical forms to study past environmental conditions as well as human activities that directly or indirectly involved or impacted the environment. In the Caribbean islands, archaeologists employ a diversity of analytical...
The Flow of Knowledge: Ancient Water Systems and Mentorscapes (2016)
From his initial doctoral work at Cerros in the late 1970s to his most recent investigations in Tikal, Vernon Scarborough’s research goals have consistently used water control as an instrument to better understand social complexity. His research has spanned a period of our own history when more sustainable approaches to growth are desperately needed as access to water is of an ever increasing concern. As his student, now colleague, this paper will highlight how Vernon Scarborough and his work...
From gods to God: The Shifting Role of Hawaiian Ritual Locations from the Pre-Contact to Post-Contact Era in Maui, Hawai'i (2018)
Recent work in the district of Kaupō, Maui, has demonstrated the presence of a highly intensified dryland agricultural system interspersed with extensive residential sites and bounded by a range of ceremonial structures that include some of the largest temples in the Hawaiian Islands. In this talk, I discuss the ritual sites of Kaupō and how their Pre-Contact placement on the landscape (before the first arrival of Europeans) demonstrates a unique expression of elite power. While the initial...
Generating a temporal baseline of human-animal exploitation in varying ecological environments between 1300CE and 1900CE for the Caribbean island of Saba (2017)
The archaeological study of historical human-environment interactions is important to elucidate the inherent links between cultural and biological/environmental diversity through time. Such studies are particularly significant in island settings, often characterized by sensitive biogeographical and ecological histories underlying current environment and social conditions. Zooarchaeology is a leading sub-discipline in the study and creation of archaeological human-environment interaction...
Geoarchaeology of a Dunefield Shell Midden Site in County Sligo, Ireland (2016)
This paper presents the preliminary results of a geoarchaeological investigation of an expansive shell midden site in a dunefield blowout area known as the Shelley Valley in Carrowdough, Co. Sligo, Ireland. Based on the results of the various geophysical and archaeological methodologies we employed at this site during the summer of 2015, we examine changes through time in the ways people utilized the seashore and its resources. Western Ireland is an ideal location in which to study temporally...
Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) Florida: Using Shoreline Monitoring along Florida’s Coast to Engage the Public (2018)
Coastal archaeological sites in Florida are being impacted at high rates by storm surge from hurricanes and sea level rise. In 2015, the Florida Public Archaeology Network began beta testing an outreach program to engage the public through monitoring Florida’s coastal archaeological sites, which has now been activated throughout Florida. Modeled after SCAPE’s Scotland Coastal Heritage at Risk Program (SCHARP) program, the goal of HMS Florida is to empower the public to observe and document...
Hitchhiking to the New World: Archaeoentomology and the Study of Introduced Insect and Ectoparasite Species. (2017)
This paper presents an overview of North American archaeoentomology, focussing on the study of introduced species. Seminal works on the introduction of plant and animal species during colonization suggested multiple parameters allowing for the colonization of the Americas by Old World species (Lindroth 1957) and introduced the term "European biological imperialism" (sensu Crosby 1972) to our vocabularies in environmental archaeology. Research in archaeoentomology, focussing primarily on beetles...
The impacts of cattle introduction in Puerto Rican landscapes during the colonial period (2017)
In this presentation I examine the environmental impacts that cattle introduction had in Puerto Rico by combining geoarchaeological and ethnohistorical methods. During the sixteenth century hides became one of the most profitable commodities to be produced in the Caribbean. For the bigger islands of the Antilles, it has been reported that these early populations proliferated, leading to underground economies based upon their exploitation. Through the analysis of historical accounts and the...
Interconnections between Indigenous Women and Traditional Fire Practices in the Far North (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women within hunter-gatherer societies have had deep interactions with fire through their cultural and gender roles for thousands of years. I aim to explore the intersections among Indigenous women of Dene speakers, fire, and material culture throughout the recent and more distant past. My focus is centered around women’s/girls’ interactions with their...
An Introduction to Environmental Archaeology (1978)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
"Just Move On": Lessons from the Career of Dr. Betsy Reitz (2016)
Betsy Reitz is universally admired as a scholar, mentor, and colleague, and known for her prodigious production of high-quality, interdisciplinary, and rigorous scholarship. She taught her many students that research should be question-driven, anthropologically significant but not disciplinary confined, and multiscalar, with an emphasis on the long view. Betsy has long crossed the traditional divide between pre- and post-Columbian archaeology, exploring long-term trends in fisheries exploitation...
Khao Toh Chong Rockshelter, Krabi: A reflection on human behavioral adaptations driven by environmental change during prehistory (2015)
Human behavioral adaptation to environmental change (i.e., sea level rise, monsoonal events) in Southern Thailand is an area of archaeology that has not yielded much study due to the preservation issues or sampling techniques. In a case study approach, geoscience and archaeological methods were utilized to trace environmental and cultural shifts at a rockshelter site occupied throughout the late-Pleistocene and Holocene. Results from this case study begin to answer questions about the foraging...
Kotið: An Integrated Geoarchaeological Investigation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Kotið, in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland, consists of several interposed components ranging from medieval outbuildings to a small dwelling from the first period of settlement in the region (ca. 870–930 CE). To understand how the inhabitants of Kotið constructed and reconstructed the buildings...
Leporids and Landscapes: Stable Isotope Ratios of Rabbit and Hare Bones Reflect Local Environmental Conditions at Modern and Archaeological Sites (2015)
This study investigates the utility of stable isotope analysis (δ13C apatite, δ18O apatite, δ13C collagen and δ15N collagen) of leporid (rabbit and hare) bones to monitor the environmental conditions in which the animals lived. Since leporids were one of the most commonly consumed vertebrates in the pre-Hispanic New World, their skeletal remains are frequently found at archaeological sites. The relatively small home ranges and short lifespans of leporids, moreover, make them an ideal species to...
Magnetic Susceptibility of Soils: Tephra, Erosion, and Fire on Columbia Plateau Landscapes (2017)
Sedimentation and soil formation on uplands of the Columbia Plateau are strongly influenced by climate, tephras, erosion of arid lands, and fire regimes. Magnetic susceptibility of in situ strata, and laboratory samples from arroyo profiles of the Yakima Upland Fold Belt can help untangle the interactions of these processes in shaping natural and cultural landscapes. Records from four profiles of overlapping age (500 to 9000 BP) are compared. Data for mass specific magnetic susceptibility are...
Mapping Contagious Abandonment and Resilience, North of New York City (2015)
The lands around New York City’s rural reservoirs contain ruins of residences, schools, churches, farms, and other businesses, displaced by watershed creation that began in the mid-nineteenth century. But even the forests around them are artifacts of the abandonment. Here, the spaces in between buildings and trash piles are the places where the region’s economy flourished before the reservoir changed everything. Treating each ruin as an individual site would ignore the interconnectedness of...