Nested Proxies: Multi-scalar Approaches to Interpreting Human-Landscape Interactions

Summary

Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi-proxy and multi-scalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple paleoecological proxies, including pollen, phytoliths, and fungal spores, derived from a five meter sediment core from Mtwapa Creek, Kenya, is presented in order to illustrate these issues and means of resolution. Using the different origin points, production, distribution, deposition modes, and associations of these proxies, I argue that discord in data between these sources can aid in isolating some of the possible environmental scenarios which may have produced particular data patterns, and may enable researchers to more effectively separate anthropogenic versus climatic impacts on past environments. It is proposed that more intensive study of the microbotanical content of sediments is critical to improving paleoecological, and by extension, archaeological knowledge of ancient landscapes and their inhabitants.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Anthropic activity markers: archaeology and ethnoarchaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage