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10.1146/annurev.energy.29.102403.140700
Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2005. 30:409–40
doi: 10.1146/annurev.energy.29.102403.140700
c 2005 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
Copyright First published online as a Review in Advance on June 14, 2005
ARCHAEOLOGY AND GLOBAL CHANGE:
The Holocene Record
Patrick V. Kirch
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720;
email: [email protected]
Key Words environmental archaeology, human ecodynamics, historical ecology,
global change, resilience
■ Abstract Although human-induced changes to the global environment and natural
biotic resources, collectively labeled “global change” and the “biodiversity crisis,” have
accelerated with industrialization over the past 300 years, such changes have a much
longer history. Particularly since the rise of agriculturally based societies and associated population expansion during the early Holocene, humans have had cumulative and
often irreversible impacts on natural landscapes and biotic resources worldwide. Archaeologists, often working closely with natural scientists in interdisciplinary projects,
have accumulated a large body of empirical evidence documenting such changes as deforestation, spread of savannahs, increased rates of erosion, permanent rearrangements
of landscapes for agriculture, resource depression and depletion (and in many cases,
extinction) in prehistory. In some areas and time periods, environmental change led
to long-term negative consequences for regional human populations, whereas in other
cases, changes favored intensification of production and increased population sizes.
Drawing upon case studies from North America, Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean,
Near East, India, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, the diversity of types of prehistoric
human-induced environmental change is assessed, along with the kinds of empirical
evidence that support these interpretations. These findings have important implications
both for the understanding of long-term human socioeconomic and political changes
and for ecologists who need to assess current environmental dynamics in the context
of longer-term environmental history.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ARCHAEOLOGY AND LONG-TERM HUMAN
ECODYNAMICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Persistence of the Noble Savage Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Rise of Environmental Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Archaeology, Historical Ecology, and Human Ecodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE RECORD OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE . . . . .
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF HUMAN IMPACT ON
ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Fauna: Domestication, Translocation, Resource Depression, Extinction . . . . . . . .
Plants and Vegetation: Exploitation, Domestication, Agriculture, Deforestation . .
Geoarchaeology: Erosion, Sedimentation, Nutrient Loss, Salinization . . . . . . . . . .
Settlement Patterns, Agrarian Landscapes, and the Built Environment . . . . . . . . . .
ISSUES OF SCALE: SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CAUSALITY, RESILIENCE, MODEL SYSTEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONCLUDING REMARKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
416
420
423
427
429
431
433
INTRODUCTION: ARCHAEOLOGY AND LONG-TERM
HUMAN ECODYNAMICS
Over the past 50 years, prehistoric archaeology has developed an increasingly
sophisticated and robust approach to investigating interactions between ancient
peoples and their environments, accumulating a large and growing database on the
cumulative human impacts to the global environment over millennial timescales.
Recently, and in consort with colleagues in the natural sciences, archaeologists
have become key contributors to the new integrative fields of historical ecology
and human ecodynamics. In this review, I canvas the role that archaeology plays in
understanding long-term human ecological impacts, drawing upon recent results
from a variety of geographic regions. The temporal focus is on the Holocene—the
present interglacial, which commenced at the end of the Younger Dryas circa (ca.)
11,000–10,000 years before present (B.P.)—during which time humans extended
their geographic reach to the most remote places on Earth, domesticated hundreds
of species of plants and animals, developed agriculturally based societies and
urbanism, and saw their own numbers increase dramatically. Although the pace of
global change unquestionably accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, human
impacts to earth’s ecosystems have a much longer history, one whose cumulative
effects have been far more pervasive than is often recognized.
Persistence of the Noble Savage Myth
The idea that civilized humanity transforms the earth and its resources through
organized activity has deep roots in Western culture, well documented in Hellenistic and Roman literature (1). The poet Lucretius waxed eloquent how “day
by day they would constrain the woods more and more to retire up the mountains
and to give up the land beneath to tilth, that on hills and plains they might have
meadows, pools, streams, crops, and glad vineyards. . .” (2). Yet when European
cultures expanded globally after the late fifteenth century in a burst of “ecological
imperialism” (3), observers often failed to see in non-Western peoples a similar
relationship of the dominance of culture over nature. Renowned Enlightenment
scholars, such as the Count Buffon, judged from the accumulated accounts of exploration that “primitive man in the New World had been unable to play the role
of aiding nature and of developing it from its rude state” (1, p. 680). In the same
vein, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew upon accounts of newly
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discovered Pacific island cultures to frame his concept of l’homme naturel, natural
man in a changeless state of harmony with nature (4, 5).
Such late eighteenth century perspectives on the relationships between nonindustrialized peoples and their environments—the myth of the noble savage—have
had remarkable persistence and continue, however subtly, to influence modern
views. Thus, for example, the anthropologist Krech (6) identifies what he calls
“the Ecological Indian,” a view of Native Americans as ultimate conservationists,
a potent symbol for Green political movements. Much research in cultural ecology,
by the same token, emphasized homeostatic regulation of complex food and energy
flows between human populations and their ecosystems, rather than long-term dynamic change. Such views even underlie current land management principles and
practices in the United States, with the stated aim of returning ecosystems to their
“presettlement equilibrium,” defined as a supposed pre-Columbian baseline (7,
p. 162). As Denevan (8) and others have convincingly argued, however, the concept of such a pre-Columbian equilibrium is a continuation of the pristine myth, and
in reality the landscape of the Americas in 1492 was one of strongly humanized,
densely populated landscapes, the product of millennia of human impacts. Yet,
even scholars who are well aware of the long-term impacts of prehistoric peoples
on the earth’s ecosystems tend to suggest that global change and the biodiversity
crisis are largely phenomena of the past three centuries (9).
The Rise of Environmental Archaeology
Nearly one-half century ago, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research organized an international symposium on Man’s Role in Changing the
Face of the Earth (10), a work which is rightly regarded as a classic in human
ecology and environmental history. Although the historians, anthropologists, geographers, and natural scientists who participated in this monumental synthesis
greatly assisted in breaking down the myth of natural man, there was notably little contribution from archaeology, which at that time was only just beginning to
broaden its research horizons beyond a preoccupation with time-space systematics of ancient cultures (usually referred to as the “culture history” approach) (11).
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, prehistoric or anthropological archaeology (in distinction to classical archaeology, which focuses on the Greco-Roman
world) rapidly incorporated new perspectives and approaches, often borrowing
methods from the natural sciences. The introduction of the “settlement pattern”
approach marked a shift away from individual site-centered studies to one that
examines entire human settlement systems within the context of their geographic
landscapes (11). A number of pioneering projects adopted research agendas in
which the central problem was defining the relationships between ancient human
populations and their physical and biotic environments. Classic studies of this kind
include Clark’s (12) excavations at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire,
the investigation by Braidwood & Howe (13) of animal and plant domestication
and early village life in Iraqi Kurdistan, and MacNeish’s (14) multidisciplinary
study of the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agricultural subsistence in
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the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico. These and similar studies established the modern
approach in prehistoric archaeology in which the analysis of faunal and floral remains was accorded equal attention with human artifacts, thus ushering in the field
of “environmental archaeology.”
The 1971 publication of Karl Butzer’s Environment and Archaeology: An Ecological Approach to Prehistory (15) could be said to mark the coming of age of
environmental archaeology, and it was followed a decade later by his more theoretically sophisticated programmatic statement, Archaeology as Human Ecology
(16). The field of environmental archaeology has not only continued to develop
and mature over the past three decades (e.g., 17–19) but has spawned the distinct
subfields of zooarchaeology, archaeobotany (or paleoethnobotany), and geoarchaeology (e.g., 20–22), each with its own specialty journals. This trend toward
subspecialization reflects in part the development and implementation of sophisticated field and laboratory methods, often requiring considerable apprenticeship
to master.
The accumulated data and interpretations resulting from several decades of
research in environmental archaeology, broadly defined, have led to a vastly enhanced appreciation of the degree to which human populations have modified their
environments, beginning in the late Pleistocene and intensifying throughout the
Holocene. Several recent syntheses distill this accumulated knowledge concerning
the “archaeology of global change” (23–25). These results not only put the final nail
into the coffin of the noble savage myth, but they should dispel any lingering notions that truly pristine environments—unmodified by human actions—persisted
any place on Earth very long after their occupation by Homo sapiens. Moreover, by
disrupting and modifying natural processes, and indeed in often reducing or even
eliminating (through extinction) the role of formerly dominant species in communities and ecosystems, humans have frequently inserted themselves as keystone
species in ecosystem functioning (8).
Archaeology, Historical Ecology, and Human Ecodynamics
Despite inevitable specialization, environmental archaeologists of all stripes have
increasingly engaged with colleagues in geography, anthropology, environmental
history, and ecology in a growing effort to develop an integrative field, variously
defined as historical ecology or human ecodynamics (26, 27). These efforts help
to counter the inevitable trend toward subspecialization, for they require interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. Historical ecology has been defined
as “the study of past ecosystems by charting the change in landscapes over time,”
with the implicit understanding that the term landscape incorporates “the material
manifestation of the relation between humans and the environment” (26, p. 6).
Winterhalder (28, p. 40) insists that historical ecology demands “an epistemological commitment to the temporal dimension in ecological analysis,” a recognition
that the properties of communities and ecosystems must be sought at least in part in
their history. This view is echoed by Barton et al. (29) in their concept of contingent
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landscapes, in which “the intertwined social and natural landscapes that are the
context of human societies are contingent on socioecological history as well as the
physical conditions under which this history took place” (29, p. 285). The practice
of historical ecology, to be sure, is not restricted to archaeology, although most
recent compilations incorporate a significant archaeological component (30–33).
The approach of human ecodynamics, although intersecting heavily with historical ecology, was explicitly defined from an archaeological perspective by McGlade
(27, 34). Human ecodynamics also privileges landscape as a core concept and asserts that there is no environment or ecosystem detached from humans and their
behavior; rather there are only socio-natural systems defined as linked sociohistorical and natural processes within specific time-space frameworks. The study
of human ecodynamics is thus described as being concerned with “the dynamics
of human-modified landscapes set within a long-term perspective, and viewed as
a nonlinear dynamical system” (27, p. 126). In addition to sharing with historical
ecology an emphasis on the contingent long-term histories of landscapes, human
ecodynamics incorporates concepts such as hierarchy, resilience, self-organization,
and nonlinear causality (35–37). Although drawing heavily on the legacy of a
largely qualitative and descriptive environmental archaeology, human ecodynamics thus moves the field toward quantitative approaches and the use of dynamic,
nonlinear models.
A point stressed by scholars, espousing either the perspective of historical ecology or of human ecodynamics, is the fundamental necessity of understanding
long-term landscape change as the outcome of both natural and social processes.
Though constantly shaped and transformed by a variety of natural processes, landscapes are also in real ways socially constructed (38). Thus, Barton et al. (29)
advance the term “socioecosystems” for landscapes shaped by dynamically linked
human-natural processes. The necessity of incorporating a social as well as natural perspective in human ecodynamics highlights the central role that archaeology
often plays in such studies; for the field of archaeology is almost uniquely situated,
with what van der Leeuw & Redman (39) have identified as a “strong tradition
of multidisciplinarity that combines the social and natural sciences.” Anthropological archaeologists are able to employ a panoply of methods and concepts
for identifying and interpreting past social, economic, political, and ideological
systems, and at the same time that they have developed—often in concert with
colleagues in the natural sciences—the ability to extract increasingly precise data
about past human-environment interactions over long timescales (40). Archaeologists, in other words, are well situated to act as interlocutors between the concepts
and languages of social and natural science. Moreover, what archaeologists especially bring to the table is a truly long-term view, the temporal scale of the longue
durée (41), which offers not only the possibility of understanding the dynamics of
socio-natural systems, but the long-term changes in the dynamics themselves, the
second order changes not evident in short-term perspective.
Several recent or current projects in various parts of the world exemplify the
approach of human ecodynamics with archaeology as a core integrating discipline.
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The Archaeomedes Project, funded by the European Commission’s program on
environment and climate, with subprojects in the Argolid of Greece and southern
Rhône Valley of France, has explored the natural and anthropogenic causes of
land degradation and desertification in the Mediterranean Basin over millennial
timescales (42). Three recent and continuing projects, all funded in part by the U.S.
National Science Foundation’s Biocomplexity in the Environment Program (43),
focus on dynamically coupled human-natural interactions, again integrating several disciplinary approaches around an archaeological core. These projects range
in the scale of socioeconomic systems investigated from the tribal level Puebloan
societies of Mesa Verde (44), to the emergent archaic states of late prehistoric
Hawai’i (45, 46), to the city-states of third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia (47).
These and similar projects demonstrate the increasingly central role that archaeology plays in revealing the deep-time history of human-induced global change.
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE RECORD
OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
As with any paleoecological study, archaeologists do not study directly past socionatural systems or landscapes; rather, they depend upon a whole range of proxy
data to represent those former systems and landscapes. Typically, such proxy data
consist of the culturally modified artifacts, along with the ecofacts or detritus of
everyday life (such things as plant remains of all kinds, animal bones and shells, as
well as inanimate objects including soil and sediments) that humans accumulated
and discarded, often at surprisingly high rates. From an empirical perspective, the
archaeological record (48) consists of those discards that have survived subsequent
diagenetic transformations and that typically occur in nonrandom, concentrated,
patterned depositional contexts. The nature of these contexts varies greatly with
place and time period, and they range from open-air camps, rockshelters, single
house sites to villages (of varied architectural forms and materials), towns, and
ultimately cities. Because the patterned activities and short-term events of daily
life that created the archaeological record are rarely discernable within such depositional contexts, this record is often likened metaphorically to a palimpsest.
The analogy is only partly valid, however, for most archaeological contexts—far
from being homogenized—exhibit stratigraphy, which allows for the delineation
of temporal structure within the larger deposit. With the increasingly wide array
of radiometric and other dating techniques now available to archaeologists and
with the development of fine-grained stratigraphic excavation methods (49), this
temporal structure can often be finely resolved.
Archaeological sites, in short, are among other things temporally structured
repositories or accumulations of a range of proxy indicators of past environmental conditions and processes. The middens, trash pits, living floors, burials, and
other contexts that make up archaeological sites contain a record, often spanning
a considerable time period, of repeated human actions within a past landscape
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that enveloped the site or sites. Wild plants and animals gathered or hunted from
a “catchment” territory surrounding the site, crops harvested from fields, wood
obtained for fuel or construction, and stone or other resources mined or quarried
for craft production all end up—usually after considerable modification through
butchering, cooking, burning, eating, working, and so on—in the artificial concentrations of debris we call sites. The size of such catchments also varies enormously,
from the relatively small radius exploited by occupants of a rockshelter or single
household dwelling to the extensive territories drawn upon by ancient cities such
as Teotihuacán, Mexico, or Harappa, Pakistan.
A critical difference between these archaeological proxies and the kinds of
materials more familiar to paleoecologists (pollen grains in lake sediments, for
example) is that the former have been collected and transported by humans, used
or manipulated in various ways, to end up discarded as artificial and dense accumulations at loci of human habitation or other activity. The archaeological record
therefore reflects not only initial cultural selection or bias in which parts of the
landscape were being utilized or in which certain resources were exploited, but also
a chain of subsequent cultural and natural transforms that act upon these materials.
For the study of human ecodynamics, this presents both advantages and disadvantages, and a prodigious literature within archaeology addresses these transform
issues (50, 51). Studies of human ecodynamics in particular regions often strive to
balance this cultural bias influencing the archaeological record of environmental
change by incorporating paleoecological data sets from nonarchaeological contexts within the same catchment. For example, a sequence of human exploitation
of plant and animals resources by the occupants of the Tangatatau Rockshelter on
Mangaia Island (resulting, over several centuries, in severe resource depression
and avifaunal extinction) was derived from analysis of the accumulated floral and
faunal remains within the stratified floor of the rockshelter (52, 53). At the same
time, larger-scale changes in the site’s landscape catchment were revealed through
a parallel program of coring of nearby lake sediments and studying these through
geochemical and palynological techniques (54, 55), showing severe deforestation,
erosion, and valley infilling. A similar example is provided by the Belo-sur-mer
site on Madagascar (56), where archaeological, paleontological, and palynological
data could all be brought to bear using an “integrated site” concept to examine
the processes of vertebrate extinction. These examples, as with other projects
mentioned above (42–47), exemplify the power of combining archaeological and
paleoecological methods within an integrated multidisciplinary approach, a model
that has now been widely adopted.
Although we are accustomed to thinking about the archaeological record in
terms of the concentrated debris accumulations known as sites, the physical remains of past human activity frequently also extend over entire landscapes. This is
especially the case with agrarian landscapes, where former episodes of cultivation
have left a permanent record of agronomic modifications, ranging from simple soil
modifications to abandoned canals, field systems, terrace complexes, or entire irrigation networks. These kinds of spatially extensive sites have characteristics quite
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different from stratified habitation deposits, but they are also amenable to dating
and chronological control. In recent decades, the archaeological study of ancient
agrarian landscapes has advanced tremendously (57–60), so that for many parts of
the world it is now possible to piece together long-term sequences of development,
expansion, intensification, and sometimes, collapse of agricultural systems. Since
much of humanity’s imprint upon the Earth derives from agricultural activity, investigating this aspect of the archaeological record of environmental change has
proved essential.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF HUMAN
IMPACT ON ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTS
Archaeologists often make a fundamental distinction between two sorts of materials that make up the archaeological record: between nonportable, or fixed structures
and features, and portable artifacts and objects of all kinds. The former include residential, ceremonial, or other kinds of architecture, as well as the more landscape
extensive constructions and soil modifications associated with agriculture, or with
other kinds of craft and industrial activities. The latter range from potsherds and
worked stone (lithics) to animal bones and plant remains, all typically associated
with particular nonportable contexts; indeed, it is the critical associations between
objects and contexts that allow archaeologists to construct a detailed spatiotemporal record. Here I canvas the main categories of materials that archaeologists use
to infer human impacts on environments and the kinds of impacts these reveal,
drawing upon specific examples from various regions of the world.
Fauna: Domestication, Translocation,
Resource Depression, Extinction
Faunal remains certainly constitute one of the most important classes of archaeological materials for understanding the record of human impact on local and
regional environments and biotic resources, and an entire subfield of zooarchaeology has developed around their identification, analysis, and interpretation (e.g.,
20, 61–63). Included are the skeletal or other hard parts of both domesticated and
wild vertebrates, as well as invertebrate remains of all kinds (ranging from edible
mollusks and crustaceans to the shells of terrestrial snails). Zooarchaeological evidence has been fundamental both to our expanding knowledge of the processes and
timing of animal domestication in both the Old and the New Worlds and to the cumulative effects of hunting, gathering, and fishing on natural animal populations
in terrestrial, coastal, and marine environments (64, 65). Because of the varied
cultural and natural transforms that determine which faunal remains are actually
preserved in any particular archaeological record (see above), the interpretation of
a faunal assemblage can be complex. Issues of taphonomy (weathering, transport,
differential preservation), cultural bias in use and discard, and sampling at several
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scales are all matters that have received extensive attention from zooarchaeologists
(16, 20). Analyses of faunal assemblages likewise range from simple taxonomic
identification to metric studies of size or growth rates, aging, sexing of animal
populations (often to infer human control and intervention in breeding), and determinations of seasonality of hunting or gathering; stable isotope ratios are used
to shed light on dietary shifts.
Massive extinctions of megafauna commenced in the late Pleistocene across
parts of the Old World, expanding into Australia and New Guinea ca. 40,000–
30,000 years B.P., and into the Americas around the time of the Younger Dryas
(66, 67). These late Pleistocene extinctions are beyond the scope of this review
except to note that a debate has been waged between scholars over the causes of
these dramatic extinction events, with strongly opposed camps stressing the role
of climate change on the one hand and human exploitation on the other (68). It is,
however, difficult to dismiss out of hand Martin & Steadman’s (69) argument that
the timing of these extinctions displays remarkable coincidence with the global
course of Homo sapiens’ dispersal. Moreover, the delay of major extinctions in
Madagascar, New Zealand, and the islands of Polynesia (52, 56, 70, 71) until
human arrivals in the late Holocene adds weight to the argument that such events
are to a large extent driven by human actions, whether through direct hunting or
indirect modification of habitats and ecosystem functioning; this is not to say that
dramatic climate change at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary did not also play
a role.
During the Holocene, human impacts on animal populations (both terrestrial
and marine) have included (a) the domestication of various formerly wild species,
resulting in genomic-level modifications with corresponding phenotypic and behavioral changes in the affected species, and in frequently dramatic expansions in
the population sizes and geographic ranges of these domesticates; (b) the translocation of nondomesticated animals through purposeful human introduction to novel
landscapes; (c) frequently severe impacts on the populations of wild mammals,
birds, fishes, mollusks, and other resources, resulting from continued predation
pressure, referred to as resource depression or depletion; and (d) when pressure
has been sustained, and/or when affected animal populations are vulnerable, local
extirpation or global extinction of species (72).
The dog was probably brought under domestication before the end of the Pleistocene, but a number of extremely significant domestications occurred in the Near
East in the early Holocene, with the archaeological evidence consisting of faunal
assemblages exhibiting phenotypic changes, such as progressive body size reduction. Caprids (sheep and goats) were domesticated by about 7000 B.C. based on
evidence from sites such as Ganj Dareh in western Iran, and cattle no later than
about 6000 B.C. (73–75). There is some evidence that pigs may have been domesticated, or at least brought under some form of human control, even earlier
than sheep and goats. In any event, the significance of these animal domestications
cannot be underestimated, for they not only resulted in major changes to human
economies and social systems, but the advent of pastoralism and the progressive
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expansion of ungulate populations over time had dramatic consequences for Near
Eastern and Levantine landscapes, and later for landscapes throughout the Mediterranean Basin. In the New World, the domestication of animals such as the llama
and alpaca did not occur until much later (ca. 3000–2000 B.C.) and had much less
impact than the Old World ungulates.
The transfer of domesticated animals beyond the geographic ranges occupied
by their wild ancestors is a fairly obvious result of human actions, but the translocation of species by humans extends well beyond domesticates and is by no means
confined even to vertebrates. Indeed, in reviewing the evidence for animal translocation in prehistory, Grayson (72, p. 17) observes that the variety of animals moved
by human colonists is “astonishing,” including for example lice, beetles, fleas,
mites, land snails, geckos, rats, mice, birds, deer, fox, and wolf. Although some
translocations were purposeful, many others appear to have been inadvertent, a
consequence of what Crosby (3) felicitously labeled the “portmanteau biota” that
humans carry with them in their movements. For islands, the impact of translocations was often severe and irreversible. A striking case of this is the introduction
of the Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) to virtually every Oceanic island by prehistoric
Austronesian voyagers (76). As a recent analysis of the consequences of rat introduction to the Hawaiian Islands suggests (77), rapid collapse of leeward dryland
forests even in advance of the direct effects of human land clearance for agriculture
were probably due to exponential increases in the R. exulans population and its
predation on seeds, seedlings, and other vulnerable vegetation.
One of the most pervasive kinds of human impact on animal populations is that
of resource depression as a result of increasing or sustained predation pressure by
humans, which can be recognized in the archaeological record by several indicators
(72). Among these are declines over time in the relative abundance of “high-return”
prey, usually larger species (often high on the trophic ladder), increases in lowerreturn, smaller taxa, and an expansion of diet breadth (the number of species
exploited) to compensate for the loss of high-return taxa. Resource depression
is also often accompanied by measurable decreases in body size. Broughton’s
analyses of resource depression in the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento
Valley of California (78–80) have become classic studies, but the phenomenon has
been recognized in many parts of the world, from continents to islands, and among
both vertebrates and invertebrates (e.g., 53, 81). Figure 1, taken from Broughton’s
work with bones of sturgeon fish (Acipencer sp.) from the Holocene deposits of the
great Emeryville Shellmound site on the shores of San Francisco Bay, illustrates
the progressive course of resource depression as measured both by the decline
in the “sturgeon index” (relative abundance of sturgeon) and in the systematic
decrease in the mean length of sturgeon dentaries. As Broughton argues, these
tightly correlated indices can only have resulted from sustained human predation
pressure.
On continents, major extinction episodes had already occurred by the onset
of the Holocene, but on islands of all sizes (in the Mediterranean, Caribbean,
Indian Ocean, and Pacific) the arrival of humans characteristically brought new
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Figure 1 Resource depression in the exploitation of sturgeon fish in San Francisco
Bay. Archaeological strata are depicted along the x-axis, with the oldest stratum being
11. Note that both the sturgeon index and the mean dentary width of sturgeon decrease
over time. [Graphs redrawn from Broughton (80).]
waves of extinction (30, 52–56, 66, 67, 69–72, 76). Nowhere is the ability of
newly arriving human populations to decimate a naive and vulnerable fauna more
evident than in New Zealand, an ancient remnant of Gondwanaland—continental
in its geological underpinnings and biota, if not in its size—that did not see human
footprints until around A.D. 1200 (82–84). In this truly pristine land prior to
human colonization, there had evolved the moa, 11 or possibly more species of
large wingless birds in two families (Dinornithidae and Emeidae). The largest of
the dinornithids stood up to 2 m high and weighed 200 kg; even smaller moa
were 0.7–1 m high and weighed between 25 and 100 kg. They appear to have
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been completely exterminated from both South and North Islands within 200–
400 years after the arrival of Polynesians, as a consequence of direct predation and
of massive habitat destruction and alteration (the latter to a large degree owing to
human-ignited fires).
The smaller islands of tropical and subtropical Polynesia have revealed multiple
histories of avifaunal extirpation and extinction, again correlating with the arrival
of humans (52, 53, 70, 71, 77). On some of these islands—Easter Island and
Mangareva being cases in point—the removal of large populations of nesting
seabirds had far-reaching consequences for their island ecosystems because these
birds were probably responsible for major inputs of phosphorus, nitrogen, and other
nutrients (through deposition of guano) essential to the maintenance of forest cover.
Easter and Mangareva are among the most severely degraded islands identified in
a recent study by Rolett & Diamond (85), and on both of these islands, we now
have evidence of formerly extensive and diverse populations of seabirds that were
eliminated owing to human predation pressure, probably within a few decades to
centuries after the Polynesian arrivals (86).
Plants and Vegetation: Exploitation, Domestication,
Agriculture, Deforestation
In parallel with faunal materials, floral (or paleobotanical) remains constitute a second major category of archaeological evidence, exhibiting many of the same kinds
of issues and complexities and engendering an entire subfield of archaeobotany
(21, 87–89). Here a distinction is often made between macrobotanical materials (seeds, nuts, wood, charcoal) and microbotanical remains (pollen, phytoliths,
starch grains), the former typically recovered through screening and/or flotation
methods, the latter requiring more elaborate extraction techniques and the use
of high-resolution microscopy for identification and analysis. Early work in archaeobotany tended to emphasize the remains of cultivated plants such as carbonized cereal grains from arid zone sites in the Near East (e.g., H. Helbaeck, in
13) or early maize cobs in Mexico (e.g., 14), thus providing critical evidence for
early cereal domestication and the spread of farming systems. The extension of
archaeobotanical research into tropical regions dominated by tuber, root, or tree
crops has proved more challenging, requiring the development of new methods
and greater emphasis on microbotanical remains (21). Archaeobotanical materials
are by no means restricted to the remains of cultigens, however, and such materials as charcoal, derived from burning fuel in hearths and ovens, or the remains
of wild plants gathered for a diversity of purposes are often abundant in archaeological contexts, providing a wealth of data on human exploitation of vegetal
resources (90). As in zooarchaeology, much work has centered around complex
issues of identification, differential preservation, and sampling bias, all essential
for adequate interpretation of archaeobotanical assemblages (89).
Human impacts to plants and vegetation communities certainly began well into
the Pleistocene, both as a consequence of plant gathering for food and materials
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and, more importantly, of the control and application of fire for a variety of purposes. Just when Homo sapiens first acquired the skills to ignite fires is a matter
of some debate among paleoanthropologists and archaeologists (91), but it was
not later than 100,000 years ago, and possibly considerably earlier. Well before
the domestication of plants and onset of widespread agricultural burning in the
early Holocene, fires purposefully set or that escaped intended control often had
dramatic consequences for landscapes, especially in arid zones more susceptible to
ignition (92). Nowhere is this more evident than in Australia, where the arrival of
humans at about 40,000 years B.P. coincides with orders-of-magnitude increases
in microscopic charcoal particles in sedimentary basins and lakes and with dramatic reductions in conifers and other rainforest taxa relative to scleroforest taxa
(93). A half century ago, the great geographer Carl Sauer (94) proposed that the
savanna lands of tropical America and the Caribbean Islands were largely the result of (or at least greatly expanded by) repeated burning by indigenous peoples
in pre-Columbian times, a hypothesis that was largely rejected at the time but
increasingly appears to be correct (95).
Human manipulation of and impact on plants entered into a whole new dimension with the initial experiments toward plant domestication and cultivation,
beginning at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary and continuing thereafter (the latest developments in genetic engineering of crops are simply a continuation of this
long process). Cereal crops including tetraploid emmer and diploid einkorn wheat,
together with barley and rye, begin to appear in prepottery settlements in the Fertile Crescent of southwestern Asia as early as 8500 B.C. and are shortly thereafter
joined by legumes including pea, lentil, and chickpea (91, 96, 97). Between 6500
and 4000 B.C., the farming systems developed in this core region had spread—in
part through a process of human population expansion and demic diffusion fueled
by the productivity of agriculture itself—throughout the Mediterranean and Europe
as far as Britain, to Egypt and North Africa, and as far east as Pakistan. In northern
China, millet and rice were domesticated between 7000–6000 B.C., underwriting
a parallel expansion of agricultural economies in East Asia. In the New World, a
completely independent trajectory of plant domestication begins with squash as
early as 8000 B.C.; maize was added about 4500 B.C., and the common bean by
500 B.C. (98). In addition to these so-called centers of domestication of cereals
and legume crops, human populations dispersed over extensive noncenters of the
tropical Old and New Worlds brought a truly amazing range of root, tuber, and
seed crops under human control.
The plant geneticist Harlan (99) lists more than 450 species of cultivated plants
in a “short list” that is by no means exhaustive. To varying degrees, the genomes
of all of these taxa were altered by human manipulation and selection, but the
impacts of this collective domestication process go far beyond the genomic level.
In developing the basis for plant cultivation and agrarian systems, humans also
unleashed their own reproductive potential, for agricultural economies permitted an unprecedented demographic expansion (96). Whereas population densities of hunting-foraging populations in the Pleistocene are estimated at between
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0.1–0.4 persons per square kilometer (pp/km2 ; 100), preindustrial agrarian populations frequently achieved densities of 50–150 pp/km2 , and in zones with highly
intensive cropping involving irrigation or terracing, up to 250 pp/km2 . Moreover, the development of agriculture laid the basis for sedentism and village life,
economic systems based on control of surplus (hence the emergence of durable
inequality), and finally, urbanism.
The environmental impacts of increasingly large, and frequently dense, populations as agrarian systems expanded during the Holocene to replace huntingforaging economies throughout most of the Old and New Worlds were orders
of magnitude greater than those caused by the smaller-scale populations of the
Pleistocene. Forest clearance for fields, agricultural burning, erosion and/or soil
nutrient depletion due to overly intensive cultivation, and secondary impacts of
dense village or urban populations (exploitation of wood resources for fuel and
construction; hunting and fishing to feed larger populations) resulted in cumulative and irreversible modifications of landscapes over increasingly large regions
of the tropical, subtropical, and temperate world. For North America, Delcourt
& Delcourt (7, Figure 3.4) argue that as indigenous populations expanded from
the late Pleistocene into mid-Holocene, and as their economies were transformed
from strictly hunting-foraging to mixed, and finally in many regions to fully agrarian systems based heavily on maize, their activities correspondingly expanded
from having mostly population (resource depression) or community-level (successional) impacts to landscape-level (forest fragmentation, resource depletion)
and truly regional effects with reorganization of entire ecosystems.
In many areas, the cumulative impacts of agricultural (and pastoral) economies
led to what can only be described as degradation of landscapes, sometimes requiring major reorganization of economic, social, and political systems in response.
This would appear to have been the case in parts of the third millennium B.C. Near
East, for example, where the cumulative effects of 4000–6000 years of farming
and herding, when combined with minor fluctuations in climate, precipitated social
collapse over much of southwestern Asia (101–103). Archaeobotanical remains
from a diversity of sites in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Near East (104, 105)
have demonstrated major forest declines in the third millennium. Miller (105,
p. 206) argues that whereas climate had been the “primary determinant of vegetation in the Near East until the Bronze Age,” by 3000–2000 B.C. the cumulative
impacts of “cultivation, herding, pyrotechnology and associated higher population
densities” began to have an influence that was, at least in certain areas, greater than
climate. It has similarly been argued that agriculture-related deforestation and erosion are correlated with the demise of the Classic Maya civilization (106–109) and
with later collapse of agricultural systems in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico ca.
900 B.P. (110).
Archaeobotanical and related archaeological evidence for human impacts to
vegetation communities is not restricted to agriculture. Early Holocene settlements in the Levant systematically deforested the landscapes around their villages
in a continual quest for fuel to produce lime plaster. At the site of ‘Ain Ghazal,
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a “devegetated area with a radius of 3.0 km or more” from the settlement was
created in the seventh to early sixth millennium B.C. (111, Rollefson in 103). Wertime (112) has estimated that slag deposits from smelting copper, lead, silver, iron,
and other ores around the Mediterranean littoral in antiquity probably amount to
between 70 million and 90 million tons, “representing the divestiture of at least 50–
70 million acres of trees.” Although regrowth obviously occurred, the long-term
impacts on landscapes cannot be discounted. The Romans increasingly turned to
“the forested flanks of Europe for its metals and glass,” and indeed measurable
trace-element increases in lead in Swedish lake sediments have been linked to
preindustrial airborne pollution derived from Greek and Roman smelting (113).
On a smaller scale, but no less severe in its impact, the Anasazi who inhabited
Chaco Canyon between A.D. 720 and 1490 seriously depleted the pinyon-juniper
woodlands that had been persistent for at least 5000 years prior to Anasazi occupation (114, 115).
The islands of Remote Oceania, which were not settled by humans until the expansion of seafaring Austronesian-speaking peoples between 3200 and 800 years
B.P. (116), have provided a series of case studies demonstrating just how rapidly
preindustrial societies can effect massive deforestation through a combination of
agricultural and other kinds of burning (30, 76, 85). Mangaia in the southern Cook
Islands had its interior volcanic hills stripped of forest soon after Polynesian arrival (53–55). Over the course of no more than 600–700 years, Easter Island lost a
forest cover formerly dominated by a large, now extinct Jubea palm, a process of
anthropogenic deforestation independently confirmed by palynology (117, 118)
and by the analysis of thousands of charcoal fragments from archaeological contexts (119). In the much larger Hawaiian archipelago, the native vegetation of the
lowland zones below about 1000 m elevation was extensively altered by Polynesians through agricultural clearing, burning, and the depredations of introduced
rats (30, 76, 77). As on Easter Island, the progressive modification of the Hawaiian
lowland forests can be tracked by several independent lines of evidence, including changes in pollen frequencies in sediment catchments, charcoal sequences
from archaeological contexts, and changing assemblages of endemic land snails.
Figure 2 shows a stratigraphic sequence of charcoal frequencies from a rockshelter
site on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, Moloka’i Island, illustrating the conversion of
a native dryland forest to a landscape dominated by herbs and shrubs (120). The
most dramatic case, however, is surely New Zealand, where Polynesians did not
arrive until around A.D. 1000–1200, yet managed to deforest vast tracts of both
the North and South Islands (83).
Geoarchaeology: Erosion, Sedimentation,
Nutrient Loss, Salinization
A third major category of evidence for human-induced environmental change is
the purview of geoarchaeology, a subfield of archaeology that intersects with and
derives much of its methodology from geology, geomorphology, and pedology, and
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Figure 2 Progressive anthropogenic change in the vegetation of the Kalaupapa Peninsula, Moloka’i Island, as indicated by charcoal
assemblages from the Kaupikiawa Rockshelter site. Analytical zone 3, the oldest, is dominated by native trees, whereas zones 1 and 2 are
increasingly dominated by shrubs, with declining taxonomic diversity. Diagram by J. Coil, adapted with modifications from (120).
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it is concerned with the sedimentary and depositional contexts of archaeological
sites as well as anthropogenic landscapes at large (15, 16, 22, 121). Geoarchaeologists work at spatial scales ranging from the microscopic (the micromorphological structure of soils or sediments), to mesoscale (formation processes and
stratification within archaeological sites), to macroscale (sedimentary regimes at
a landscape level). In any particular project, work at all three scales may be required for an adequate understanding of how human actions and socioeconomic
systems have interacted with natural processes to shape landscapes. Pioneering
work in geoarchaeology tended to emphasize methods derived from sedimentology and geomorphology (15, 16), although more recent work has expanded to
incorporate soil micromorphology and geochemical analysis of soil properties
(22).
Whereas archaeobotany chronicles the history of human plant use, expansion of
agrarian systems, and deforestation through the record of microscopic and macroscopic plant remains, geoarchaeology traces anthropogenic landscape effects by
examining the physical evidence for erosion and sedimentation. A classic example
of such geoarchaeological work comes from the southern Argolid of Greece, where
extensive studies by Wagstaff, Van Andel and others (122–124) have demonstrated
that intermittent pulses of erosion and sediment deposition are tightly correlated
with phases of human settlement and land use. This is especially noteworthy because earlier geological study (125) had interpreted a widespread sequence of
valley infills in the Mediterranean region as having been controlled by climatic
events. Finer-grained geoarchaeological research in the Argolid revealed a far more
complicated series of cut-and-fill deposits within the Holocene (encompassed too
grossly within Vita-Finzi’s “Younger Fill”), which—rather than correlating to climate change—are tightly linked with episodes of farming, grazing, and human
settlement. As Van Andel and others interpret the evidence, a major phase of
erosion and alluviation commenced about 4500 years B.P., roughly one millennium after the introduction of agriculture, and “as the result of gradual shortening
of long fallow produced by increasing settlement density or of rapid clearing of
steep, marginal soils” (123, p. 125). Later in the Argolid sequence, the development of terraces and check dams helped to reduce but did not wholly eliminate
such anthropogenic erosion. Subsequent work in the Argive Plain and Thessaly,
Greece, has revealed similar sequences, again pointing to the dominant role of
human activity (124). Moreover, the picture emerging from geoarchaeological
studies in Greece is by no means unique; Goldberg & Bar-Yosef (126) summarize geoarchaeological evidence from the Levant and adjacent areas suggesting
that during the last five millennia, “human interference with the environment”
has supplanted climatic fluctuations as the “decisive factor” in shaping Levantine
landscapes.
Other examples can be cited from the Oceanic tropics. Aneityum Island in
southern Vanuatu was first colonized around 2900 years B.P. by Austronesian
peoples of the Lapita culture, who introduced an agrarian economy based heavily on root crop production using shifting cultivation (127). Microscopic charcoal
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particles in Anauwau Swamp mark the immediate onset of burning (associated with
shifting cultivation), and pollen frequencies show precipitous declines in tree and
shrub taxa relative to increases in grasses and ferns. After about one millennium
of human occupation and gardening on the island, major episodes of valley infilling commenced with sediment derived from the steep volcanic hillslopes. These
sediments also extended out onto former reef flats, creating coastal plains, which
then became settings for intensive agricultural practices including irrigation. The
Aneityum story is repeated over much of the southwestern and central Pacific. For
the large island of New Caledonia, Sand (128) reports massive sediment accumulations (in some cases burying earlier occupation deposits under 6 m of alluvium) in
the island’s valleys by around 2000 B.P., about one millennium after initial human
colonization. In the Koné region of New Caledonia, sediment deposition onto coral
reefs and sandy bays transformed these into mud flats, in the process completely
transforming the spectrum of mollusks available for human consumption (129).
Similarly, on the large island of Viti Levu in the Fiji archipelago, significantly increased sediment loads deriving from anthropogenic alteration of the landscape in
the drainage basin of the Sigatoka River (probably primarily as a result of shifting
cultivation) began around 1500 B.P. resulting in the accumulation of a massive
parabolic dune field at the valley mouth, burying late Lapita period occupations
(130). And, on the island of Mo’orea in the Society Islands, Lepofsky et al. (131)
examined sedimentary deposits containing macroscopic charcoal and dated a rapid
sequence of erosion and alluviation in the ‘Opunohu Valley that again correlates
to human colonization and the establishment of cultivation systems on the interior
valley slopes.
Geoarchaeology also contributes to our understanding of the impact of cultivation systems on soils and their ability to sustain productive agriculture over
long time spans. Sandor (132, 133) contrasts two cases, from New Mexico and
Peru, in which prehistoric farming practices had very different outcomes for the
properties of the respective agricultural soils. In New Mexico, soils cultivated
prehistorically by the Mimbres people remain partly degraded nearly 900 years
after agriculture ceased, indicated by significant losses of organic matter, nitrogen, and phosphorus. In contrast, soils in agricultural terraces in the Colca Valley
of Peru display elevated fertility status, even after 1500 years of cultivation, a
consequence of a “carefully constructed agricultural system well-adapted to its
mountainous environment” (133, p. 241). Recent and ongoing geoarchaeological
research on prehistoric dryland cultivation systems in the Hawaiian Islands (46,
134) has quantified nutrient loss due to intensive farming of sweet potato and taro
root crops. In these systems, elemental soil nutrients in cultivated soils show losses
of up to 50% when compared to uncultivated soils in the same areas, after about
four centuries of intensive farming practices.
Soils have also been adversely affected by ancient cultivation regimes through
extensive irrigation resulting in salinity damage. The classic case is southern
Mesopotamia (135, 136) where irrigation elevates the shallow water table, and
capillary action brings mineral salts to the surface. Major salinization occurred in
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southern Mesopotamia from about 2400 to 1700 B.C., requiring a shift from wheat
to more salt-tolerant barley. Even barley yields declined progressively, however,
as indicated by temple records showing a drop from an average of 29 bushels per
acre around 2400 B.C. to as low as 10 bushels per acre by 1700 B.C. The great
urban centers of southern Mesopotamia were not able to be sustained under these
declining agricultural regimes, and the long-term legacy is “a saline plain that
requires expensive salinity control methods for intensive agricultural production”
(136, p. 330).
Settlement Patterns, Agrarian Landscapes,
and the Built Environment
In canvassing the diversity of evidence acquired by archaeologists relating to how
humans have shaped the global environment, I have thus far stressed faunal and
floral remains and geoarchaeological data. But one cannot neglect the vast category of archaeological remains referred to as nonportable artifacts: structures,
settlements, permanent agrarian landscapes, and the built environment generally.
The “settlement pattern” approach in archaeology was formally introduced by
Gordon Willey (137) in his study of the Virú Valley, Peru, and defined broadly
by him as “the way in which man disposed himself over the landscape on which
he lived.” In the five decades since this pioneering study, settlement archaeology
and its offspring (spatial archaeology, landscape archaeology) have advanced in
theoretical perspectives and methodological rigor as well as in geographic diversity of landscapes that have been intensively studied (e.g., 138–141). Geographic
information systems (GIS) are playing an increasing role in archaeology, especially in the integration of multidisciplinary data sets obtained at a range of spatial
scales (142), from site excavation to regional survey and to remote sensing. GIS
databases are increasingly linked to agent-based models and computer simulations
in order to test hypotheses of human-environment interactions over time in specific
landscapes (143).
As human societies increased in size and scale throughout the course of the
Holocene (see below), from simple village communities to urban centers and eventually empires linked by roads and transportation networks spanning vast regions
(144), the surface area of the Earth modified by human constructions increased geometrically. The archaeological literature on settlement landscapes is too extensive
to review here, but a few examples may demonstrate the importance of this category of evidence. The Archaeomedes Project (42, 145) has examined a sequence of
human occupation and use of the Rhône Valley, France, from early Holocene times
through the Roman and Medieval periods. Their study demonstrates particularly
well how modern landscapes have been shaped by long-term processes of human
settlement, sometimes through multiple cycles of settlement expansion, agrarian
system transformation, crisis, and reorganization. In the Rhône Valley, the urban
component of the present-day spatial system and the road system derive from the
Roman period, whereas the village structure is essentially Medieval. “The overall
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spatial configuration and the main anchor points are spatially stable. Neither colonization, wars, political disasters nor epidemics have fundamentally changed the
spatial organization of the area, because they operate on different spatio-temporal
scales” (145, p. 345). Here truly, is an example of Braudel’s longue durée (41),
human-natural systems that endure over thousands of years even as shorter-term
political structures wax and wane.
Extensive reshaping of landscapes in both the Old and New Worlds was frequently linked to trajectories of agricultural intensification. As noted earlier,
archaeobotanical evidence for deforestation resulting from both cultivation and
pastoralism is abundant for many regions. The intensification of agriculture, however, also frequently followed pathways of “cropping cycle” intensification and
of “landesque capital” intensification (146, 147), both resulting in permanent restructuring of the physical as well as biotic landscape. These include a variety of
irrigation, drainage, and other water control systems for agricultural production,
terracing, field boundaries, and field systems (57, 60), landscape features that persist long after cultivation is abandoned, and that in some cases may be brought
in and out of production as social and economic systems are transformed. Classic
archaeological examples of such landesque capital agrarian landscapes include
the vast canal networks of the Diyala Plain and elsewhere in Mesopotamia (148,
149), clearly visible through aerial photos millennia after they were abandoned;
the canals, reservoirs, aqueducts, and similar agricultural facilities extending out
over the landscape surrounding the Medieval city of Vijayanagara in southern India
(150); and the dryland field system of Kohala, Hawaii Island (46, 147), a continuous landscape of thousands of field walls, boundaries, trails and other agricultural
features covering more than 52 km2 .
The most artificial or anthropomorphized of environments is—without doubt—
the true city, and the rise of urbanism is another facet of the built environment to
which archaeology has made enormous contributions over the past century. Urban
centers arose in Sumeria between the late fourth and early third millennia B.C.
(91, 148, 149), with such famous cities as Nippur, Susa, Uruk, and ‘Ur. As noted
earlier, the cumulative pressure on the resources of southern Mesopotamia deriving
from the dense populations of these cities, including their surrounding villages and
agricultural hinterlands, precipitated an environmental crisis by the third millennium B.C. Between 2500–2000 B.C., the Indus Valley civilization flourished with
major urban centers such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. In Mesoamerica, urban
centers arose in several areas including the Maya lowlands (sites such as Tikal,
El Mirador), Oaxaca (Monte Alban), and central Mexico (Teotihuacán) during the
Classic Period of the first millennium A.D. (151). A city such as Teotihuacán is
estimated to have had a population of at least 85,000 persons. In China, the Shang
civilization of the second millennium B.C. also saw the rise of urbanism, with
sites such as Anyang, which covered an estimated 24 km2 . All of these early cities,
as with those which would follow them, constituted vast sinks into which energy
and materials flowed from extensive catchments extending out from such centers
many hundreds of kilometers.
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ISSUES OF SCALE: SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC
One aspect of varying scale in the archaeological record of environmental change
has already been noted: the sizes of the landscape catchments drawn upon by the
former populations of particular sites, representing the larger area from which
materials deposited in the site were collected. For smaller sites such as individual
household dwelling units, these catchments may be relatively small (e.g., a few
hectares up to perhaps 10 km2 in extent), whereas in the case of ancient cities just
described such catchments extended out over large distances.
Scale is also critical when one considers the hierarchical relationships between
levels of sociopolitical organization and their population sizes, spatial extent, and
temporal duration. Although discredited as a unilineal model of cultural evolution, a basic classification of human societies into four major categories (91, 152)
remains useful as a heuristic device for understanding how the scale and relative
impact of human social groups have expanded over the course of the Holocene
(Figure 3). Throughout the Pleistocene and into the early Holocene, human groups
were organized as family units, or bands, at times coming together into short-term
assemblies for economic or ritual purposes. Such groups might range over fairly
large territories and have considerable persistence over time, but their group numbers were small and their densities low. The first experiments with village life and
the origins of a tribal level of social organization can be traced to the PleistoceneHolocene transition period in the Near East (91). Although catchment size per
se did not necessarily increase (mobile hunter-gatherers were, in fact, likely to
cover more territory than sedentary farmers), both group size and density per land
area increased significantly. A major transition in sociopolitical organization occurs with what anthropologists call the chiefdom, marked among other criteria by
hereditary power and true “durable inequality” expressed as social stratification.
Again, population size, catchment area, and density ratchet up significantly, with
a corresponding increase in the potential impacts to the landscape exploited by a
chiefdom society. Chiefdoms arose at different times in different regions of the
world, but they were a dominant mode of sociopolitical organization after ca. 3000
B.C. in the Old World and after ca. 1000 B.C. in the New World, until—in many
cases—these were supplanted by, or became tributary to, states. Early forms of the
state, referred to as “archaic states,” are characterized by the rise of divine kingship, incipient forms of bureaucracy and taxation, and the use of force to maintain
durable inequality. States display enormous variability in their attributes (not all
are urbanized, for example), but for our purposes, we need only note that they
once again ratchet up the scale of population size, spatial extent, and impact on
the environment by at least an order of magnitude.
Of course, these four major classes of sociopolitical organization do not represent a unilineal evolutionary sequence, and over the past several thousand years, all
stages coexisted and interacted in complex ways. Nonetheless, taking a very broad
view of human history, it is notable that family groups and bands were the exclusive
mode of organization from the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species
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Figure 3 Scale factors in sociopolitical formations. (A) Temporal persistence versus
population sizes of four major kinds of sociopolitical formations. (B) Population sizes
versus catchment areas of four major kinds of sociopolitical formations. Redrawn with
modifications from Reference 7.
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until the end of the Pleistocene. In the past 10,000 years that we call the Holocene,
we have successively witnessed the development of tribal societies, chiefdoms,
archaic states, nation states, and empires. The temporal pace of social change—
and the corresponding changes in population size, spatial extent, and population
density—are essentially exponential over the course of the Holocene. Needless
to say, the relative impact that human groups have had on their environments has
followed the same general exponential trend.
When looked at in terms of regional and local scales, of course, such general
trends decompose into historical sequences that display considerable temporal variation, for example in demographic trajectories. Paleodemography, or demographic
archaeology (100), requires large, statistically valid data sets, such as well-dated
house counts, in order to derive estimates of population growth and decline over
time. As archaeologists and paleoecologists work toward understanding the ways
in which human and natural systems were tightly interlinked, however, having
accurate paleodemographic data becomes increasingly important. The linkages
between cycles of population growth and decline, and human-induced landscape
transformation and degradation, are often complex and sometimes inverse. This is
shown, for example, by the case of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Mexico, where initial
land degradation caused by human settlement later becomes ameliorated as a large,
burgeoning population was able to invest large labor inputs into land management
resulting in a decline in erosion (154). Following demographic collapse resulting
from the Spanish conquest, however, the inability to maintain labor-intensive landscapes and their subsequent abandonment led to another cycle of land degradation.
This example, one of many that could be cited, points up the necessity of deriving
independent, accurate estimates of human population numbers and densities as an
integral part of the investigation of human ecodynamics.
CAUSALITY, RESILIENCE, MODEL SYSTEMS
Anyone who has followed—even in a cursory manner—the advances that archaeology has made over the past half century in tracing the myriad ways in which human
populations have irreversibly shaped the physical and biotic world we inhabit will
recognize that global change has been underway since the early Holocene. The
record of cumulative resource depression, translocations, extinctions, deforestation, erosion and sedimentation, expansion of agrarian landscapes, and increasing
urbanization dispel any lingering views that pristine ecosystems persisted until the
expansion of the industrialized West. Understanding how socio-natural systems
have coevolved over time, however, requires more than merely cataloging the ultimate outcomes of long-term processes of change. It is essential to try to understand
the processes of change themselves, which, as we have noted, are highly dynamic
and nonlinear.
Mayr (155, p. 67) wisely observed that “it is nearly always possible to give both
a proximate and an ultimate causation as the explanation for a given biological
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phenomenon.” This dictum applies equally well to the study of long-term global
change, the focus of considerable argument over whether particular sequences of
ecosystem and landscape change have been caused by inevitable natural forces,
especially climate, or by collective human actions. The debate has been intense
with respect to the wave of megafaunal extinctions occurring in the terminal Pleistocene, with various proponents staking out positions on one side or other of
the causal divide (66–69, 72). Similar debate, again invoking either climate or
unsustainable land use practices, attends the question of the collapse of various sociopolitical systems in the southwestern Asia during the third millennium B.C. (33,
101, 102). In both cases, causality is likely to have involved complex interactions
between both climate and human actions, so a simple deterministic explanation is
unconvincing.
The study of human ecodynamics also needs to confront head on the issue of
how past human societies perceived (or failed to perceive) environmental impacts,
how social systems themselves adapted or responded to change, and the degree
to which such systems could be resilient over long time cycles (29, 34). Because
changing environmental conditions were themselves frequently, at least in part,
the outcomes of prior human land use decisions (hence “contingent” landscapes),
this is not simply a matter of attempting to track cultural response to climate
change, although the matter is sometimes presented in such unidirectional terms
of a nature → culture stimulus response (e.g., 156). Moreover, the degree to which
a society is able to respond to environmental challenges, whether self-induced or
not, depends greatly on its ability to perceive and analyze change and to act upon
its assessments. As Van der Leeuw notes, “a society cannot communicate with its
environment, it can only communicate about its environment within itself” (157,
p. 139). A number of investigators have recently found the concept of resilience,
“the ability of a system to maintain its structure in the face of disturbance, and
to absorb and utilize change,” to be more theoretically informative than a simple
concept of adaptation (157, p. 135). As Van der Leeuw observes for the Rhône
Valley case, however, resiliency may over time lead to more dependencies and
less ability to respond dramatically in the face of a sudden crisis, such as one
brought on by drought or other environmental disasters. Delcourt & Delcourt (7)
have drawn upon “panarchy theory” (36), which hypotheses cycles of exploitation
(r dominated) to conservation (K dominated), followed by collapse/release and
reorganization to understand long-term ecosystem-scale human-natural systems
in North America. Whether such metatheory will provide a successful means
of integrating and understanding disparate historical sequences of human-natural
systems coevolution remains to be seen.
Another valuable approach to understanding human-natural system dynamics
over the long-term is that of identifying and analyzing model systems, an approach
which has proved successful in a number of fields of science, including ecology
(158). This is the perspective taken by our own multidisciplinary group attempting
to understand the nonlinear dynamics driving linked cultural and natural system
changes in the Hawaiian Islands (45, 46). Owing to its isolation, highly orthogonal
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433
biogeochemical gradients, late colonization by humans introducing an agricultural
economy, and rapid sequences of population growth, agricultural intensification,
and political transformation, Hawai’i is seen as offering one such model system.
Equally important and complementary to the model systems concept is the use
of agent-based simulation and similar computational models to test hypotheses of
human-natural system interaction, response, and resilience (143).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In just five decades, the state of our knowledge has advanced tremendously from
where we were when the classic symposium Man’s Role in Changing the Face of
the Earth attempted to synthesize the long-term impact that human populations
have made upon the Earth and its resources; much of what we have learned has
been gained from archaeology, often working in consort with paleoecology. This
review has touched upon some highlights of what we now know concerning the
extent to which humans transformed global ecosystems over the course of the
Holocene. One thing is clear: Homo sapiens has been an environment transforming species virtually since we gained control over fire and launched our relentless
trajectory of technological development, deep in the Pleistocene and early in our
own biological history. In the Holocene, with the domestication of plants and animals, development of agrarian and pastoralist economies, evolution of increasingly
stratified and complex sociopolitical systems, and rise of urbanism, virtually no
parts of the planet remained pristine, even prior to the expansion of Europe and
industrialization (the sole exception would be Antarctica). Understanding this history of global change is certainly valuable in its own right, and if nothing else puts
the nail to the coffin of the pristine myth, a legacy of the Enlightenment period.
Yet dare we hope that such retrospective understanding of how humans have transformed the Earth—and in the process suffered through a panoply of crises, social
collapses, and restructurings—could possibly be of use in guiding our collective
future? Some at least think that the archaeological record provides lessons that
could guide our future (159). Whether we heed them is up to us.
The Annual Review of Environment and Resources is online at
http://environ.annualreviews.org
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