Shifting Baselines: Tales of the unexpected

Summary

A shifted baseline is the intergenerational acceptance of the progressive degradation of a system as reflecting its natural state. Paleoecological analyses have revealed the long-term usage by humans of sites previously thought to be ‘pristine’. Analysis of lake sediments in remote areas of Panama and Ecuador revealed unexpected histories of land usage. In Ecuador, Lake Ayauch provided a record of maize agriculture from 6000 years BP. At Lake Wodehouse, in Panama, a 3300-year long record from an apparently mature forest setting yielded a long history of maize agriculture. In both cases the expectations of little human influence on the environment were falsified. Finding the pre-human baseline may require looking as far back as the early Holocene in the Andes, whereas it may be as recent as 1920 in the Galapagos Islands. Lake Junco, on the Galapagos Island of San Cristobal, was impacted by human activity in the late 1920s, and changes associated with the introduction of grazing animals were evident in the pollen record. What was unexpected in this study was the composition of the flora prior to that disturbance. Fossil pollen evidence pointed to a different natural baseline than was generally described for the highlands of the Galapagos Islands.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• ‘Siempre a la Vanguardia’: A Tribute to Dolores Piperno Contributions to the Origins and Spread of Agriculture   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage