Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last 30 years, archaeologists in North America have been increasingly attuned to the complex connections between Indigenous peoples and their environments. Shifting away from deterministic thinking, this environmentally conscious archaeology has explored how people and their environment are co-constituting while deteriorating the nature-culture dichotomy. Landscapes, waterscapes, and climate are all actants in historical processes, variably contributing to culture change and the decisions employed by ancient communities. Environmental actors have important social, political, and cosmological significance in Indigenous histories. In the current era, archaeologists are oriented toward novel methodologies and anthropological frameworks which permit investigations of the cultural factors entangled in the interactions between humans and both the environment and changing paleolandscapes through time. This session brings together scholars from across the discipline to consider new ways of thinking and expand narratives of the Native deep history of the continent. Participants build on a variety of theoretical corpuses, cross-disciplinary methods, and re-framed historical narratives to develop a compelling environmental anthropology of antiquity. Our aim is to articulate anthropological approaches and new possibilities in environmental archaeology.

Other Keywords
North America • Landscape Archaeology • historical ecology • Environment and Climate

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Climate Change and Local Socio-Ecological Systems in the Past along the Georgia Coast, USA (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modelling expected environmental conditions derived from past global climatic trends presents an issue of scale when linking the historical trajectory of past societies to climatic change. Global climate change influences local environmental conditions at scales critical to the contextualization of...

  • A Coastal Landscape of Change: Late Holocene Sea-Level Fluctuations and Estuarine Resource Availability during the Early Woodland Period at the Creighton Island Shell Ring Site (9MC87), Georgia, U.S.A. (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cajigas.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Creighton Island shell ring (9MC87) is a crescent-shaped shell midden, approximately 40 m in diameter, that was constructed by Native Americans participating in multi-seasonal, cooperative and sustainable shell-fish mass capture and fishing techniques during the Late Archaic period (3000–1000 B.C.)....

  • Exploring Early Pottery Function, Foodways, and Land-Use Change in the Middle Savannah River Valley: Results of Organic Residue Analysis (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Bartz.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we consider the functions of Late Archaic pottery vessels from the Middle Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina to identify patterns of differential use between mobile and increasingly settled groups. To directly determine the function of these early cooking pots, organic...

  • The Historical Ecology of Shell, Water, and Land in the Atchafalaya Basin (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayur Mehta.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From archaeology to ethnohistory to ethnography, studies of Indigenous Gulf Coast communities have revealed remarkable watery landscapes of earth and shell. Throughout the Atchafalaya Basin, a dynamic and rapidly changing floodplain intersected by lakes, bayous, and marshes, and surrounding drainages,...

  • How Worlds Collide: Drought and Culture Change in a Late Woodland Frontier (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only John Henshaw.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interwoven pathways of culture and environment are key to the interpretation of the past. Ancient peoples navigated the complexities of environmental changes through strategic decisions and the management of local landscapes. This dynamic holds true for the Chesapeake region where historically...

  • <html>Weathering Change: <i>Responses to Climatic Change along the Black Warrior River</i></html> (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Boucher.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late-Mid Holocene the southeast was impacted by dramatic changes in climate causing what appears to be a large shift in past people’s interaction with the landscape seen through a regionwide restructuring of settlement patterns and the abandonment of significant places. Noting these...

  • Landscape Use During the Middle Holocene in the Upper Tombigbee River Valley, Northeast Mississippi (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Strawn.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Holocene, marked by the Hypsithermal, was a time of warmer and drier climate conditions that impacted subsistence strategies and settlement patterns. There is evidence of increased social complexity, including the development of long-distance exchange networks, the establishment of...

  • Managing the Worlds’ Edge: Human-Environmental Relationships and Manitou in the Chesapeake (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Jenkins.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The edges of forests and waterways in the Chesapeake region were spiritually potent places on the Woodland period landscape, serving as thresholds that opened pathways between worlds. Powhatan historical ethnography hints that these liminal spaces required people to perform ceremonies and offer gifts...

  • Pueblo Firescapes in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Liebmann.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Over the past three decades the size and intensity of wildfires has increased markedly in the western United States. While this increase in extreme fire behavior has been fueled by climate change, it can also be traced to human decisions made throughout the 20<sup>th</sup> century regarding the...

  • A Regional Perspective on Shell Fishing, Shifting Environments, and the Communities of the Georgia Coast (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carey Garland.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mollusk geochemistry and paleobiology data from shell rings support an interpretation that villagers on the Georgia Coast during the Late Archaic developed complex institutions centered on sustainable shellfish harvesting practices. These institutions appear to have been long-term, lasting for hundreds...

  • Social Relations at the Nature-Culture Nexus: A Case Study from Mississippian (AD 1050-1550) Tampa Bay, Florida (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Trevor Duke.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of property, as a resource to be owned, controlled, and inherited, is in many ways foundational to anthropology. Heritable property is particularly integral in developing what we often refer to as corporate groups, clans, and social houses. As traditionally conceived, the social group forms...

  • With or Without You: Manatees and People in Precolonial Florida (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn.

    This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostis) has been described as one of the state’s most famous and iconic animal species. However, the natural history of the Florida manatee is poorly understood. We systematically reviewed the literature for the occurrence of manatee bones from archaeological...