Pastoralism and Anthropogenic Land Cover Change (ALCC) Mapping

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

PAGES LandCover6k explores the relationship between past human activity and variability in the palaeoecological record to produce global maps of anthropogenic land-cover change based on sound archaeological knowledge and palaeoecological proxies, maps which will be available for use by the climate modelling community to better understand past climate dynamics. As a first step, we are producing global maps of human land use at various points across the last 6000 years. The vast majority of global land use is today dedicated to food production via livestock and crop cultivation. While the potential impacts of the latter are relatively well-understood – land is cleared of existing vegetation and replaced by domestic species – the changes effected by animal husbandry are far more diverse, ranging from the ephemeral to the devastating. In order to successfully and usefully map the implications of such economic practices, it is necessary to understand both the diversity of pastoralism, from mixed agriculture to nomadic herding. This paper discusses the various impacts that pastoralism can exert, framed in the context of how we can reasonably expect to chart and delimit these practices; specifically, we consider the relationship between pastoralism and ALCC, and implications for PAGES LandCover6k.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24720