Impacts of settler-colonial Invasion on ecosystem structure and animal occurrence in the Bear River Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Exogenous factors, such as climate, and endogenous dynamics, such as human resource and landscape modification influence ecological conditions. Over long temporal scales, these dynamics create socio-environmental systems (SES) that influence the distribution of plant and animal species across the landscape. However, in many contexts, Indigenous SES and their ecological legacies have been disrupted by European settler-colonial invasion, forced removal, and genocide leading to the collapse of Indigenous populations and their coupled ecosystems. One example includes the Bear River Massacre, where 400-450 members of the Northwestern Band for the Shoshone Nation were murdered and had their ancestral land stolen by the United States Government in 1864. In this study, we employ Survival Analyses using Random Forest machine learning to evaluate the impacts of this tragedy on species loss in the region. We use species occurrence data from archaeological, paleontological, historical, ethnographic, and contemporary wildlife survey records to assess the impacts of the timing of colonization on the occurrence of culturally significant taxa, such as bison, deer, wolves, and beaver, and taxa belonging to different ecological and dietary functional groups in the area. The results of our study will help inform the Tribal-led ecological restoration efforts of the Bear River Massacre site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53660