Islands and Invasives: The Archaeology of Plant and Animal Translocations

Summary

This presentation aims to show how the progresses of biological knowledge allows archaeology to take advantage of the paleontological and archaeozoological documentation accumulated during the last 40 years on the islands, to increase its set of evidence –admittedly indirect -- on the early seagoing in the Mediterranean. It presents a brief review of the geographical and paleogeographical frameworks as well as the basics of island biogeography and focuses on the different ways in which mammals were able to colonize remote islands. The review of the extinctions and immigrations of mammals since the Late Glacial on the five larger Mediterranean islands, which have stayed isolated since that time, highlights the major role that human beings played in the construction of modern mammalian communities on these islands. In turn, this phenomenon is a remarkable source of information for investigating early seafaring in the Mediterranean.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands and Invasives: The Archaeology of Plant and Animal Translocations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage