A Deep History of Human Activity in the Jiuzhaigou National Park

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

China’s tuigeng huanlin, or “Returning Farmland to Forest,” program has been widely praised as the world’s largest and most successful payment for ecosystem services program, as well as a major contributor to China’s dramatic increase in forest cover. In order to the preserve the biodiversity and the scenic lakes found in the Jiuzhaigou National Park, and believing that the history of human impact inside the park was relatively short (less than 200–300 years), authorities decided to remove or minimalize human impact, resettling nine villages of Amdo Tibetans who originally occupied the area. Since 1999, park policies have prohibited residents from farming and wood cutting, and since 2001, residents can no longer herd animals above the tree line. For the Amdo Tibetans, these narratives are at odds with their own social landscape knowledge of the region. Recent archaeological, archaeobotanical, geomorphological, and zooarchaeological evidence from the park provides evidence of the limitational knowledge Amdo Tibetans had. These forms of knowledge challenge assumptions of shallow time depth of human occupation in the region and shows that rather than harming local biodiversity, intermediate levels of disturbance created by small-scale farming, pastoralism, and tree cutting have contributed to the biodiversity of this region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36589.0