Entangled Biodiverse Landscapes: Human and Environmental Dynamics in the Mountain Steppes of Armenia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper we investigate the entanglement of agro-pastoral and ecological processes on the creation and maintenance of vegetation biodiversity in the mountain steppe of Armenia, an area that has been a steppe for the entire Holocene (Cromartie et al. 2020). Focusing on the Bronze and Iron Age we discuss how biodiversity was co-created by human and nonhuman actors and highlight the importance of this diversity on both social and ecological resilience. We use statistical models based on pollen and macro-charcoal data from an already published sediment core (Cromartie et al. 2020) and combine it with archaeological data from the archaeological project, Project Aragats. We found that humans have not only utilized the diverse resources of this steppe but also shaped this diversity through their agro-pastoral practices, both directly and indirectly, with other ecological actors. We note that increases in biodiversity primarily occur due to increases in wetland and agriculture weeds and suggest these small changes in plant communities were ecologically engineered by these Bronze and Iron Age human groups. [Cromartie, Amy, et al. “The Vegetation, Climate, and Fire History of a Mountain Steppe: A Holocene Reconstruction from the South Caucasus, Shenkani, Armenia.” Quaternary Science Reviews 246 (2020):106485.]

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36861.0