What the Shells Tell: Interdisciplinary Malocoarchaeology and Holocene Paleoclimate in Coastal Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Dolores Piperno has been a trailblazer in interdisciplinary research, building on deep, innovative approaches to plant remains to answer a multitude of questions in archaeology and beyond. In this interdisciplinary spirit, I review research into Holocene paleoclimate along the Peruvian coast derived in the first instance from the study of archaeological mollusk remains. This work began in the 1960s, has involved many investigators, and has employed a diversity of approaches: ethnoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, biogeography, and the analysis of growth increments, isotopes, and trace elements. Early results suggested a simplistic model of Holocene paleoclimate in this region. Over the last quarter century, the addition of other proxies and a growing database offer a much more complex, locally nuanced climate history linked directly to archaeological phenomena—a history that is necessary to understand human eco-dynamics in this climatically dynamic and environmentally extreme region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36820.0