More Like this

1. Remote Sensing Reveals Lasting Legacies of Land-Use by Small-Scale Foraging Communities in the Southwestern Indian Ocean

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.689399  

   Davis, Dylan S.; Douglass, Kristina (September 2021, Frontiers in ecology and evolution)

   Clark, G. (Ed.)

   Archaeologists interested in the evolution of anthropogenic landscapes have productively adopted Niche Construction Theory (NCT), in order to assess long-term legacies of human-environment interactions. Applications of NCT have especially been used to elucidate co-evolutionary dynamics in agricultural and pastoral systems. Meanwhile, foraging and/or highly mobile small-scale communities, often thought of as less intensive in terms of land-use than agropastoral economies, have received less theoretical and analytical attention from a landscape perspective. Here we address this lacuna by contributing a novel remote sensing approach for investigating legacies of human-environment interaction on landscapes that have a long history of co-evolution with highly mobile foraging communities. Our study is centered on coastal southwest Madagascar, a region inhabited by foraging and fishing communities for close to two millennia. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, including a wave of faunal extinctions, little is known about the scale, pace and nature of anthropogenic landscape modification. Archaeological deposits in this area generally bear ephemeral traces of past human activity and do not exhibit readily visible signatures of intensive land-use and landscape modification (e.g., agricultural modifications, monumental architecture, etc.). In this paper we use high-resolution satellite imagery and vegetative indices to reveal a legacy of human-landscape co-evolution by comparing the characteristics – vegetative productivity and geochemical properties – of archaeological sites to those of locations with no documented archaeological materials. Then, we use a random forest (RF) algorithm and spatial statistics to quantify the extent of archaeological activity and use this analysis to contextualize modern-day human-environment dynamics. Our results demonstrate that coastal foraging communities in southwest Madagascar over the past 1,000 years have extensively altered the landscape. Our study thus expands the temporal and spatial scales at which we can evaluate human-environment dynamics on Madagascar, providing new opportunities to study early periods of the island’s human history when mobile foraging communities were the dominant drivers of landscape change. 

   more » « less
2. Steven Hartman, Astrid Ogilvie, Jon Haukur Ingimundarson, Andrew J Dugmore, George Hambrecht, Thomas H. McGovern

   Steven Hartman, Astrid Ogilvie (January 2017, Global and planetary change)

   This paper contributes to recent studies exploring the longue durée of human impacts on island landscapes, the impacts of climate and other environmental changes on human communities, and the interaction of human societies and their environments at different spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the paper addresses Iceland during the medieval period (with a secondary, comparative focus on Norse Greenland) and discusses episodes where environmental and climatic changes have appeared to cross key thresholds for agricultural productivity. The paper draws upon international, interdisciplinary research in the North Atlantic region led by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) in the Circumpolar Networks program of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE). By interlinking analyses of historically grounded literature with archaeological studies and environmental science, valuable new perspectives can emerge on how these past societies may have understood and coped with such impacts. As climate and other environmental changes do not operate in isolation, vulnerabilities created by socioeconomic factors also beg consideration. The paper illustrates the benefits of an integrated environmental-studies approach that draws on data, methodologies and analytical tools of environmental humanities, social sciences, and geosciences to better understand long-term human ecodynamics and changing human-landscape-environment interactions through time. One key goal is to apply previously unused data and concerted expertise to illuminate human responses to past changes; a secondary aim is to consider how lessons derived from these cases may be applicable to environmental threats and socioecological risks in the future, especially as understood in light of the New Human Condition, the concept transposed from Hannah Arendt's influential framing of the human condition that is foregrounded in the present special issue. This conception admits human agency's role in altering the conditions for life on earth, in large measure negatively, while acknowledging the potential of this self-same agency, if effectively harnessed and properly directed, to sustain essential planetary conditions through a salutary transformation of human perception, understanding and remedial action. The paper concludes that more long-term historical analyses of cultures and environments need to be undertaken at various scales. Past cases do not offer perfect analogues for the future, but they can contribute to a better understanding of how resilience and vulnerability occur, as well as how they may be compromised or mitigated. 

   more » « less
3. A first empirical analysis of population stability in North America using radiocarbon records

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683620919975  

   Bird, Darcy; Freeman, Jacob; Robinson, Erick; Maughan, Gideon; Finley, Judson Byrd; Lambert, Patricia M; Kelly, Robert L (September 2020, The Holocene)

   null (Ed.)

   Questions regarding population stability among animals and plants are fundamental to population ecology, yet this has not been a topic studied by archeologists focusing on prehistoric human populations. This is an important knowledge gap. The fluctuation of human populations over decades to centuries – population instability – may constrain the expansion of human economies. A first step toward describing basic patterns of population stability would be to identify sizes of fluctuations through time, since smaller fluctuations are more stable than larger fluctuations. We conduct a biogeographic analysis of the long-term stability of human societies in North America using a continental scale radiocarbon dataset. Our analysis compares the stability of summed calibrated radiocarbon date probability distributions (SPDs) with subsistence strategies and modeled climate stability between 6000 and 300 BP. This coarse-grained analysis reveals general trends regarding the stability of human systems in North America that future studies may build upon. Our results demonstrate that agricultural sequences have more stable SPDs than hunter-gatherer sequences in general, but agricultural sequences also experience rare, extreme increases and decreases in SPDs not seen among hunter-gatherers. We propose that the adoption of agriculture has the unintended consequence of increasing population density and stability over most time scales, but also increases the vulnerability of populations to large, rare changes. Conversely, hunter-gatherer systems remain flexible and less vulnerable to large population changes. Climate stability may have an indirect effect on long-term population stability, and climate shocks may be buffered by other aspects of subsistence strategies prior to affecting human demography. 

   more » « less
4. Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado Plateau

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025047118  

   Pavlik, Bruce M.; Louderback, Lisbeth A.; Vernon, Kenneth B.; Yaworsky, Peter M.; Wilson, Cynthia; Clifford, Arnold; Codding, Brian F. (May 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   Humans have both intentional and unintentional impacts on their environment, yet identifying the enduring ecological legacies of past small-scale societies remains difficult, and as such, evidence is sparse. The present study found evidence of an ecological legacy that persists today within an semiarid ecosystem of western North America. Specifically, the richness of ethnographically important plant species is strongly associated with archaeological complexity and ecological diversity at Puebloan sites in a region known as Bears Ears on the Colorado Plateau. A multivariate model including both environmental and archaeological predictors explains 88% of the variation in ethnographic species richness (ESR), with growing degree days and archaeological site complexity having the strongest effects. At least 31 plant species important to five tribal groups (Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Apache), including the Four Corners potato ( Solanum jamesii ), goosefoot ( Chenopodium sp.), wolfberry ( Lycium pallidum ), and sumac ( Rhus trilobata ), occurred at archaeological sites, despite being uncommon across the wider landscape. Our results reveal a clear ecological legacy of past human behavior: even when holding environmental variables constant, ESR increases significantly as a function of past investment in habitation and subsistence. Consequently, we suggest that propagules of some species were transported and cultivated, intentionally or not, establishing populations that persist to this day. Ensuring persistence will require tribal input for conserving and restoring archaeo-ecosystems containing “high-priority” plant species, especially those held sacred as lifeway medicines. This transdisciplinary approach has important implications for resource management planning, especially in areas such as Bears Ears that will experience greater visitation and associated impacts in the near future. 

   more » « less
5. A review of community impacts of boom-bust cycles in unconventional oil and gas development

   Klasic, Meghan; Schomburg, Madeline; Arnold, Gwen; York, Abigail; Baum, Melissa; Cherin, Maia; Cliff, Sydney; Kavousi, Parisa; Tillett Miller, Alexandria Jordan; Shajari, Diana; et al (October 2022, The journal of energy research and social sciences)

   Unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) has become the most widespread form of energy production in the United States. The booms and busts associated with UOGD are not unique to the industry, but the impacts to local communities are. As the industry continues to dominate the nation's energy landscape, and marginalized communities are disproportionately exposed to the extraction processes, it is important to understand the full scope of the environmental and social impacts experienced by communities during booms and busts. We review the literature on both the ecological and social boom-bust impacts of UOGD, noting the dearth of research on bust-time impacts. We conclude by calling for greater research on the long-term impacts of busts, in particular, and on understudied aspects of social impacts like those to public services, infrastructure, and social capital. 

   more » « less