The Centrality of Saplings: Trees and Archaeoecological Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Often when we examine past ecologies we focus on food webs--what people ate, and how people were connected to larger trophic entanglements. However, by analyzing the networks that form around the myriad uses beyond food of other biota we can see how humans embed themselves in and structure ecologies worldwide. As part of the archaeoecology project we have analyzed seven cultures around the world and noticed that one thing is in common—each of these places have trees as a central position in the network of taxa that humans use. In this paper we leverage network analysis to understand the central position of tree species around the world and discuss the implications that this had both for the cultures using those trees and for the ecologies more broadly. When exploiting a tree species often that species is removed which can convert forest spaces to grasslands. A network approach can help us understand these trade offs and help us to examine the central place that trees held for multiple cultures worldwide.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41601.0