Environmental Rebound in the Protohistoric Americas: Untangling Cause and Effect

Archaeological data have demonstrated that prehistoric Americans had considerable influence on the structure of their environments; however, this influence often went unacknowledged by the accounts of European colonizers, who were struck by what seemed to them "pristine" landscapes. One proposed cause for this contradiction is environmental rebound: indigenous populations were so reduced by disease, violence, and other consequences of colonization that there was a rebound of resources to historically observed levels. Although widely invoked as an explanation for the pristine myth, environmental rebound in the protohistoric Americas is not well understood, in part due to the methodological challenges involved in exploring multi-causal explanations. How did disease, warfare, and other aspects of colonization combine to produce demographic change? Was rebound ubiquitous in the Americas? Did it occur after initial contact with non-indigenous populations or only after sustained colonization? In testing for rebound in the archaeological record, how do we disentangle the effects of climate change and in situ cultural change? This symposium will explore these and other challenges in identifying protohistoric changes in environment and subsistence.