CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

From Field To Table: Historical Ecology of Regional Subsistence Strategies March 19-20, 2010 Inn at USC South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology University of South Carolina, Columbia

Conference Themes:

Reconstructing the long-term ecological impacts of subsistence practices is critical to interpreting the role that humans play in regional ecological communities. Anthropology, however, continues to rely on a few set models for thinking about these impacts, e.g., optimal foraging, diet breadth, domesticated landscape, and behavioral ecology. These approaches, in general, are not sophisticated in their approaches to long-term change or in assessing multiscalar impacts of subsistence strategies across the landscape. Historical ecology, a cultural and ecological framework that relies on multiple scales of data to interpret regional long-term landscape change, is an approach rarely applied to understanding the impacts of human subsistence. Scholars from different disciplines and sub-disciplines are invited to participate in a two-day workshop to demonstrate the application of historical ecology to evaluate the enduring effects of subsistence practices on human landscapes. These scholars will draw on both modern and ancient datasets, as well as a variety of subsistence traditions, e.g. rangeland use, house gardens and outfield production, woodland foraging, river management. Aside from making scholarly presentations to the University of South Carolina (USC) community, the participants will work together, using a white-paper colloquium format, on a collective statement. The statement will locate, through concrete example, both problems and advantages of using this interdisciplinary approach to evaluate the temporal effects of human subsistence on regional ecology.

Conference Abstracts:

The Historical Ecology of Ritual and Monumentality in South Florida
Victor D. Thompson, The Ohio State University, Columbus

Most historical ecology studies focus on how extraction or modification of subsistence resources to a greater or lesser extent created anthropogenic landscapes. This paper addresses the nature of landscape modification in the Lake Okeechobee basin of South Florida. As an alternative and complementary perspective to more common approaches to historical ecology, I argue that the ritual was the primary driver of landscape modification by the fisher-hunter-foragers of South Florida. However, it was the reliability, predictability, and abundance of these resources found in the wetlands and coasts of this area that provided the necessary base for large-scale ritual to become inscribed upon the land. These ritual modifications come in many forms and include platform mounds, linear earthworks, geometric earthworks and barrow pits, effigy barrow pits, artificial ponds, canals, and burial mounds.

Toward a historical ecology of transportation: The case of Panama
Ashley Carse, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Anthropology

This essay calls for a historical ecology of transportation. Through an analysis of five centuries of travel across Panama (via trails, railroads, canals), I examine the intertwined histories of transit routes, the sites they connect, and the often-neglected landscapes at their margins. Drawing on work in Actor Network Theory, I argue that historical ecology research sensitive to material flows – of seeds, animals, and people, but also technologies, texts, and institutions – reveals that landscape histories are more contingent and linked than we often imagine. If these flows can be retraced, they may augment and suggest different interpretations of in situ research.

Repairing the Damage: Reforestation, Restoration, and the Birth of the Modern Industrial Tree Farm
Emily K. Brock, University of South Carolina

Social Landscape Analysis: correlating one half of the picture
Ismael Vaccaro, McGill University and O. Beltran, Universitat of Barcelona

In this paper we will discuss how we face the social analysis of landscape as a process of correlation of several layers of meaning over the territory: topography, demography, property regimes, productive practices, managerial political institutions, and cultural perspectives over the environment. In particular we will focus on a specific example of the historical altitudinal changes of the demography in a small district of the Catalan High Pyrenees. This methodological effort, the historical correlation of settlement patterns composition and altitude is an important step for the understanding of the landscape of these valleys, understanding that will deepen once we add the jurisdictional, institutional and economic transformations to the picture. We sustain, however, that the picture will not be completed until we combine this work with a detailed land cover change sequence. In other methodological words, landscape analysis, social or ecological, cannot be completed without thorough interdisciplinary research integration.

Clams, Seasonality, Long Term Ecosystem Dynamics
Irvy Quitmyer, Florida Museum of Natural History and Chester DePratter, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology

In the Land of Plenty: Agent-based Approaches to Modeling Subsistence in the Puebloan Southwest
R. Kyle Bocinsky, The Village Ecodynamics Project, Washington State University

Understanding human eco-dynamics requires a multiscalar approach that couples global and regional paleoenvironmental indices with complex models of human-environment and human-human interactions. The Village Ecodynamics Project accomplishes this by employing an agent-based simulation framework over the multifarious high-resolution paleoclimatic data available in the American Southwest. We model crucial resources, such as water, fuel wood, and fauna supported by local plants, and then allow simulated households to survive on this landscape by gathering resources, growing maize, and exchanging goods with one another. By programming our agents to make approximately optimal decisions about where to live, we are able to parse out what factors-ecological and otherwise-had the greatest impact on past peoples’ decision-making.

Highland Andes: Merging paleoethnobotanical evidence and archaeometric techniques to track environmental changes due to food production
William T. Whitehead, Ripon College

The highland Andes can be categorized as having extensive but fundamentally sensitive ecosystems due to the pressures of altitude, geography, and climate. When human subsistence patterns began to crystallize, diversify, and increase in sophistication in the highlands in the holocene we begin to see ecosystem impact almost immediately. Using data from paleoethnobotanical, geographic and climate reconstruction studies, this chapter will begin to outline what we know about ecosystem change in the Andean highlands. Techniques from previous studies will be reviewed and some new and innovative methods being developed in archeometry will be discussed, such as pXRF, large scale database integration of diverse datasets, and isotopic techniques. The Lake Titicaca region will be the major case study for this chapter, but several locations from the mid-elevations in Peru will also be included.

Diversity, Standardization, and the State: The Politics of Maize Agriculture in Postclassic Central Mexico
Christopher Morehart, Northwestern University

The reduction of biological diversity is a result of many contemporary systems of environmental interaction. This process can occur as an unintended consequence of mismanagement and over-exploitation or can be an established and highly intended goal of specific institutions, such as modern transnational corporations. Many ecologists employ a common narrative of a pre-capitalist, traditional, and sustainable past to contrast with and criticize current conditions, policies, and practices. The past political economies that archaeologists reconstruct, however, often had a substantial impact on the agricultural strategies of farmers, frequently leading to the standardization of systems production and reduced diversity. This paper examines this issue by exploring the relationship between maize agriculture and political development at the Postclassic kingdom of Xaltocan in central Mexico. This study assesses how the diversity of maize present in the community changes through time as the polity developed and declined in political power and how local relationships and practices were related to agricultural collapse. In contrast to romantic visions of the past, this work has implications for understanding how political economic institutions have affected biological diversity throughout human history. On the other hand, this study also recognizes that past systems of environmental interaction were subject to different patterns of resilience and recovery than today.

Feeding History: Deltaic Resilience, Inherited Practice, and Millennial-Scale Sustainability in an Urbanized Landscape
Jennifer Pournelle, University of South Carolina, and Carrie Hritz,The Pennsylvania State University

The landscape of southern Mesopotamia is a palimpsest of modern and ancient features representing overt attempts to modify the "natural" fluvial regime, incremental changes accruing to long-term subsistence strategies, and events triggered by the interaction of geomorphologic forces with these anthropogenic changes. Using niche construction models informed by mulitscalar settlement surveys, remote sensing data, and paleoenvironmental proxies, this paper lays out historically verifiable signatures of subsistence practices in deltaic settings, examines their long-term ecological impacts, explores their role in the development and durability of complex society, and presents a landscape heritage uniquely suited for multi-millennial-scale examination of sustainable environmental practices.

Legacies on the Landscape: Long-term Socio-ecological Interactions in Southwestern US
Katherine Spielmann, Sharon Hall, Melissa Kruse and Dana Nakase Arizona State University, School of Human Evolution and Social Change and School of Life Sciences

The Legacies on the Landscape project is a collaboration between ASU archaeology and ecology faculty and students to understand the enduring effects of prehistoric agriculture on the ecosystem of Perry Mesa, Agua Fria National Monument, Arizona. We are evaluating the degree to which 1) extensive prehistoric (late A.D. 1200s to early 1400s) water control modifications (rock alignments and grids) on agricultural fields across the mesa improved water and nutrient retention sufficient for long-term corn farming, and 2) prehistoric farming and the persistence of these modifications into the present have influenced soil properties and vegetation on th is landscape.

Anthropogenic Traces of Human/Bionomic Interactions in the Great Pee Dee River Valley of South Carolina during the Late Prehistoric Period (A.D. 600-1200).
Christopher Judge, University of South Carolina Columbia

Over the course of late prehistory human groups in the Great Pee Dee Valley modified their settlement and subsistence strategies in response to various fluctuating factors both natural and cultural. This paper presents a landscape view of Late Woodland and Mississippian site distribution in the Upper Pee Dee drainage to address questions regarding how these groups mapped onto the landscape between A.D. 600 and 1200. l undertake a multi-sited approach and examine the land at several spatial and temporal scales. Human interactions with riverine and upland environments and resultant changes to Native American subsistence, settlement and sociopolitical worlds can be understood and nuances explored by applying the concepts offered by historical ecology and landscape studies.

Comparative Historical Ecology of Three Lecos Communities: Situating Livelihoods and Landscape Interactions in the Bolivian Piedmont
Meredith Dudley, Tulane University

Research on the historical ecology of the Bolivian Lecos, currently recuperating their ethnic identity, requires a concomitant sensitivity to the way human communities are mutually constituted in historical relationships linking local environments with wider spheres of interaction. Changing macro-historical circumstances introduced new resource demands and productive practices in the piedmont, with consequent changes to local forests and savannahs. Multi-sited ethnography among three Lecos communities revealed that processes of landscape transformation and ethnogenesis were neither uniform over the region nor consistent across the group. This paper compares the historically contingent and spatially situated historical ecologies of Inca, Irimo, and Santo Domingo, with implications for contemporary livelihoods in the region.

Ground Truthing Historic Rice Plantation Landscapes Using GIS
Lisa Randle, University of South Carolina, Anthropology

The East Branch of the Cooper River Drainage system is bounded along the center line of a ridge dividing French Quarter Creek and the main channel of the Cooper River. It is situated in the Lower Coastal Plain on the northern boundary of the Sea Island Coastal Region of the South Atlantic Slope. The current land use in the East Branch of the Cooper River is primarily rural and wooded. Portions are owned by the U.S. Forest Service, there are scattered single family dwellings and businesses near French Quarter Creek, Nucor Steel owns what was historically known as Hagan Plantation, and the remaining land is privately owned or held by timber companies and consists of large holdings. Ferguson and Babson (1986:6) created a composite map of the East Branch of the Cooper River in which they focused on locating where people lived, the settlement pattern, and the development of the rice agriculture. The goal of Ferguson and Babson’s map was to survey eighteenth century plats and maps, from the end of the Revolutionary War through the first two decades of the nineteenth century, to develop a model of eighteenth century settlement. With the assistance of Geographic Information System software I compare current land use records with historic land use as documented in the Ferguson/Babson map to ground truth the location of potential archaeological sites. This is a pilot study, which is part of my dissertation work on rice plantations along the East Branch of the Cooper River, Berkeley County, South Carolina.

Critical Evaluation of the Sustainability of Agroecosystems of the Prehispanic Mayas - Implications of Hunting and Animal Domestication in the Northern Maya Lowlands
Christopher M. Götz Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad Autonoma de Yucatán, Merida, Yucatán

This presentation discusses the environmental agroecosystem management by the Prehispanic Maya from a zooarchaeological point of view, based on data from recent investigations at the Central and Northern Maya Lowlands. To discuss the Prehispanic patterns of environmental management, I consider the ecological application of models for animal domestication and sustenance and compare zooarchaeological research data from the Central Maya Lowlands (North of Guatemala) with those from the Prehispanic Maya sites of Champotón, Chichén Itzá, Dzibilchaltún, Sihó and Xcambó, located in the Northern Maya Lowlands (modern Mexican states of Yucatán and Campeche) in the light of the models discussed. Between both areas, the Northern and Central Maya Lowlands, there are considerable environmental differences, separating the tropical humid Central Lowlands of evergreen forests from the Northern Lowlands, dominated by a dry subtropical climate and seasonal forests. The central theme is a discussion of the management of wild and domestic resources by the Prehispanic Maya, as reported between the Classic and Postclassic Periods (~ 600-1500 A.D.), analyzing the catchment areas of the sites mentioned above, based on the taxonomic profiles (taxonomic variety of vertebrate species) of the vertebrate faunal remains excavated. The taxonomic profiles encountered will be evaluated according to models of 'Garden Hunting' and incipient domestication, discussed for indigenous cultures of the American subtropics. I evaluate the applicability of these models for the zooarchaeological data mentioned, in relation to the ecological zone from where the archaeological data originated. Finally, the observations drawn from the discussions will be used to review the potential application of zooarchaeological data to modern environmental management models, especially in subtropical areas of Latin America, relating thus this presentation with the work of local non-governmental organizations in indigenous communities, as well as federal faunal protection and management plans in Mexico.

Creating a Mississippian Landscape in Central South Carolina
Gail E. Wagner, Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia

This study examines macrobotanical remains recovered from deposits spanning A.D. 900 to 1700 at Late Woodland villages and Mississippian mound towns in the chiefdom of Cofitachequi along the Wateree River in central South Carolina. Data also are drawn from a regional pollen sequence, regional tree ring records, and historical accounts. Pine (Pinus) and oak (Quercus), which have long been important canopy dominants in central South Carolina, can be used as indicators of disturbance and fire. Frequency of fuelwood taxa combined with other macrobotanical remains make it clear that anthropogenic fire played an important role in the vegetation of this area.

Southern Slow Foods: Ecological Awareness through Gourmet Heritage
Sarah Quick, Winthrop University

Stemming from preliminary research on Anson Mills, a relatively young operation based in Columbia, South Carolina, this paper considers Midlands locals conjoined in their pursuit of southern heritage food ways, sustainable farming, and the Slow Food movement. Anson Mills sells high-end, heirloom grains—grits their most famous product—direct to chefs as well as select retailers and individual consumers. Selling globally to create revenue for seed preservation, Anson Mills reconstructs past subsistence models through its historically informed farming and cuisine. Anson Mills’ mission to revive better-tasting food varieties and seed biodiversity also provides a critical counter to agribusiness.

Climate, Cod, or Culture? Variability in Kodiak Island's Prehistoric Fisheries
Catherine F. West, University of Washington

This research assesses the effects of climate change and fluctuating resource abundance on prehistoric fisheries using stable isotope analysis, zooarchaeological remains, and salmon abundance data. Given the fluctuation in Pacific salmon populations during the late Holocene, this research tests whether people on Kodiak Island accommodated these fluctuations with increasing use of the marine environment and the Pacific cod fishery. The results indicate that neither salmon abundance, nor climate change had significant effects on prehistoric fishing; rather, cultural factors, such as the storage economy, may explain changes in fishing strategy seen on Kodiak. This project underlines the complexity of the mechanisms influencing foraging strategies, and the potential of these datasets to contribute to an understanding of the long-term processes affecting human-environmental interaction in island Alaska.

Future in the Past: How archaeology can save the world
Thomas Foster, University of West Georgia

Understanding the effects of humans on the earth and long-term ecosystem dynamics are crucial for continued economic development and quality of life world-wide. Archaeological and historical data are central to our understanding of long term ecological processes particularly those that have occurred during the Holocene. In this paper, I will discuss how anthropological archaeology can be used with other ecological data with varying scales of analysis. I will discuss how ecological metrics of change can be created in order to measure human effects on the environment over time and a case study where these methods are being used for modern environmental policy.

Understanding Cognitive Landscapes of Subsistence Through the Reconstruction of Caloric Efficiency, Predictability and Potentiality
Thomas G. Whitley, Brockington and Associates, Inc.

For many years, archaeologists have relied on the constructs of environmental disciplines to frame arguments regarding human interaction with the “caloric” environment. Although, ecological models have reshaped how we interpret patterns of subsistence, they have not been developed from an agent-based perspective. As a result, we only have a vague understanding of the cognitive choices and decisions that past people experienced. New technologies such as GIS allow us to reframe those arguments in terms that do represent approximations of what the agents experienced in terms of a “caloric currency,” and provide a better understanding of their cognitive landscapes of subsistence.

Along Annual Lines: Considering the Social Roles of Annual and Perennial Components of Agroecosystems in the Development of Social Complexity
David J. Goldstein, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology

In considering the rise of social complexity in the Neotropics, the importance of agroecology among the peoples of Lowland South America and the Yucatán Peninsula has received a great deal of attention. This mirrors an increasing appreciation of the role that perennials play in both Old and New Worlds agroecosystems historically and archaeologically. Agroecology examines the complementary role of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants in agriculture, and is a primary component of modern global initiatives for sustainable agriculture. Existing models for the development of domestication, however, focus largely on monocultures or solely herbaceous vegetation. Recent work along the Peruvian coast demonstrates the presence of multi-tiered and biodiverse agricultural systems, including a variety of herbaceous plants and tree species, from the Cotton Preceramic to the Late Intermediate Period (B.C.E.3500-1350 C.E.). The most stable elements of these agroecosystems are long-lived plants whose life spans extend across several human generations and continue to play important roles in modern agriculture. This talk looks examines a way to consider the social components of perennial and annual agricultural systems to consider how their proportionate role in subsistence may give us a deeper understanding of how early agricultural societies organized, and the legacy of these social components on the modern landscape.

A Good Place: Esthetics of Landscape and Historical Ecology
Amanda Tickner, University of North Carloina-Chapel Hill

This paper presents ideas of landscape, aesthetics, and historical ecology and the relationship of those ideas. Historical ecology posits that culture and ecology are inextricable, and their interface results in landscapes. Landscapes then are a vital element in historical ecology. Landscapes are created, in part, via people's aesthetic preferences. Tracking the origins, the qualities people seek, and the interface between landscape aesthetics and other cultural elements (such as the development of text) can then be a historical ecology study. A diverse range of fields provides data/information to discuss this topic including: behavioral ecology, landscape architecture, archeobotany, cultural anthropology and art history. Implications of the consideration of aesthetics for ecological restoration (also an element in the historical ecology methodological orientation) are also discussed.

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