Paleozoological Baselines Inform Climate Change and Help to Restore Indigenous Socioecological Systems: A Case Study from the Bear River Basin, UT

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As human impacts on ecosystems accelerate, there is a growing emphasis in conservation planning toward maximizing the capacity of ecosystems to respond to anticipated changes in the near future. Doing so requires understanding how ecosystems responded to past changes (e.g., human impacts, altered climates) that occurred over timescales exceeding those of direct human observation. Paleozoological data provides such a record and documents baselines of animal communities that can be used to evaluate historic anthropogenic change and attest to the responses of species to ecosystem changes over geological timescales. This study uses paleoclimate and paleozoological data from a high-elevation cave deposit in the Bear River Basin, straddling modern-day Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, to establish an independent record of faunal abundance for the region, capturing a greater range of potential species representation than historic observations. We then compare the paleorecord to modern zoological survey data and climate records to evaluate whether anthropogenic climate change has contributed to local range shifts or extirpations, as has been predicted for the region’s montane mammals. Then, we discuss how our findings will contribute to an ongoing interdisciplinary project led by the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation to restore Indigenous socioecological systems in the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39196.0