Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Globally, communities have often surrounded their everyday habitats, their sociopolitical centers, their burial grounds, and their sacred sites with symbolic and/or economically useful trees and plants. Archaeological perspectives demonstrate how cultural land use was a driver of ecosystem change through time. For example, forests once considered “wild” are now in many regions seen as the direct reflection of past human activity, as communities actively managed forested foodsheds and woodlands with important economic use. In other instances, trees can remain the longest lasting legacy of otherwise short-term occupations. This session gathers scholars of diverse regions of the world and temporal foci who apply varied data sources (archaeological, anthropological, and historical or a combination thereof) to speak to the importance of particular tree species for ceremonial and/or quotidian use or to the management of forests as cultural and natural landscapes. Papers highlight particular methods (e.g., GIS, anthracology, botanical surveys, pollen analysis, community engagement), theoretical perspectives (e.g., nonhuman object agency, historical ecology), and/or specific themes (settlement pattern analysis, spatial analysis, phenomenology, cultural landscapes) in their exploration of human-forest-tree dynamics.

Other Keywords
Historic • historical ecology • Ethnohistory/History • Environment and Climate  • Subsistence and Foodways • Digital Archaeology: GIS • Political economy • Geoarchaeology • Historical Archaeology • Survey

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United Mexican States (Country) • Belize (Country) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Republic of Ecuador (Country) • United States of America (Country) • Delaware (State / Territory) • Georgia (State / Territory) • Mississippi (State / Territory) • Tennessee (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)
Documents
  • The Centrality of Saplings: Trees and Archaeoecological Analysis (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

    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. Often when we examine past ecologies we focus on food webs--what people ate, and how people were connected to larger trophic entanglements. However, by analyzing the networks that form around the myriad uses beyond food of other biota we can see how humans embed themselves in and structure ecologies worldwide. As part of the...

  • Deforestation of Pacific Islands Driven by a Combination of Land Use, Fire, and Climate (2024)
    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...

  • Finding a “Living Archaeology” among Tropical Trees: The Potential of Multidisciplinary Dendroarchaeology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Caetano Andrade. Patrick Roberts.

    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. Tropical forests have often been synonymous with 'wilderness' in popular discourse. However, the last couple of decades of research in archaeological, palaeoecological and historical ecology have revealed that these ecosystems have actually been intensively managed by our species from at least 45,000 years ago. This necessitates...

  • A Geospatial Analysis of Sacred Trees and Archaeological Sites in the Precontact Society Islands (French Polynesia) (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn.

    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. Archaeological, anthropological, and historical sources speak to the importance of particular tree species for ceremonial and quotidian use in precontact Polynesian chiefdoms. Archaeological studies have largely discussed the spatial association of trees and archaeological sites in an ad hoc manner, thus more refined spatial analyses...

  • Money Grows on Trees: Arboricultural Proxies and Engendering Ancient Maya Finance (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson. Travis Stanton. Audrey Rosen. José Francisco Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

    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. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...

  • Patterns of Ecological Succession and the Archaeology of Living Trees (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Graham Callaway.

    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. Human activities have a strong influence on the species makeup of wooded landscapes. This means that the species present in a wooded area can be a useful line of evidence for understanding past land use. However, patterns of ecological succession are complex and influence by many factors, including the types of plants and animals...

  • People, Trees, Rice: Consequential Intersections and Complicated Relationships in the Lowcountry (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Palmer.

    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. Multiple dramatic changes in human-forest relationships are manifest in the landscape of the coastal region that spans southern North Carolina to northern Florida known as the Lowcountry. Ecologically diverse bottomland hardwood forests managed by Native Americans since at least the Woodland period were destroyed by settler-colonist...

  • Ponderosa Pine Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado: What We Have Learned from 40 Years of Recording, Dating, Analyzing, and Consulting with Tribal Peoples (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Martorano.

    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. Ponderosa pine trees with cultural modifications, primarily bark peeling and wood removal, were first officially documented in Colorado at Great Sand Dunes in the late 1970s by the author for her master’s thesis. At that time, CMTs were not recorded as cultural resources in Colorado. Since then, several hundred ponderosa pine CMTs...

  • Shades of Confinement: Collaborative Study of a Historic Treescape at Amache National Historic Site (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Clark. April Kamp-Whittaker. Steven Sharpe. Greg Kitajima.

    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. Trees—whether planted, pruned, or left to grow in their natural setting—can provide detailed evidence about intention, expertise, and aesthetics of the people who planted or lived among them. This paper overviews the methodologies employed and research findings of scholars studying the trees of Amache, Colorado’s WWII-era Japanese...

  • Sharing Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in an Outdoor Exhibit with the Waccamaw Indian People (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian. Katie Stringer Clary. Cheryl Cail. Harold Hatcher.

    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. The Waccamaw Indian People (WIP) are a close-knit community that shares knowledge of the relationships, culture, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of their ancestors. Working collaboratively, we have created an outdoor exhibit and interpretive trail that embraces TEK as a means for the public to learn about Indigenous...

  • Trees among the Cereal Fields: Arboriculture Reframed as Integral to the Food and Economic Systems of the Indus Civilization of South Asia ca. 3200–1500 BC (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Bates.

    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. In this paper I synthesize a big picture of how people in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization of South Asia engaged with trees as a vital resource, and how there was no single conception of trees as “wild” versus “domesticated,” “orcharded” versus “stand-alone,” “exotic” versus “native,” and potentially “owned” versus “communal.” While...