Questioning Rebound People and Environmental Change in the Protohistoric and Early Historic Americas

About this book

The record of human impact on world environments is undeniable; scholarship has shown that the ecosystems we live in today are structured by human behaviour. Equally undeniable is the fact that events such as war, disaster, disease, or economic decay have, at various times throughout history, led to the human abandonment of particular environments. What happens to a human-structured environment when the way people use it suddenly changes? In Questioning Rebound, authors Emily Lena Jones and Jacob L. Fisher explore the archaeological record of a time when the human footprint on the land abruptly shifted: the period immediately following European contact in the Americas. During this time of disease-driven mortality, genocide, incarceration, and forced labour of Indigenous peoples, American landscapes changed in fundamental ways, producing short-lived ecosystems that later became the basis of myths about the American environment.

Questioning Rebound explores the record and the causes of environmental change during the post-Columbian period, featuring case studies throughout the Americas. While both the record for and the apparent causes of the changes in the human footprint vary, the record of post- Columbian environmental change consistently reflects the environmental impacts of past social upheaval.

Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables

1. Questioning Rebound: Placing the Protohistoric in the Context of Anthropogenic Environmental Change / Jacob L. Fisher and Emily Lena Jones
2. The “Pristine Myth,” Post-Columbian Environmental Rebound, and Multicausality / Emily Lena Jones
3. Apocalypse Then: Searching for Faunal Rebound in the Post-Contact West Indies / Christina M. Giovas
4. Animales Salvaje y Domésticos: The Environmental Consequences of Spanish Colonization in the Maya Region / Asia Alsgaard and Emily Lena Jones
5. Late Holocene Environmental Rebound in Northwest Patagonia: Zooarchaeological, Stable Isotope, Radiocarbon, and Ancient DNA Evidence / Gustavo Neme, Cinthia Abbona, Adolfo Gil, Clara Otaola, Jeff A. Johnson, Lisa Nagaoka, and Steve Wolverton
6. Rebound of Fire Regimes in the Dry Forests and Woodlands of the Southwest U.S.A., AD1200–1900 / Christopher I. Roos, Thomas W. Swetnam, and Matthew J. Liebmann
7. The Evidence for Wildlife Irruptions in Protohistoric California / Jacob L. Fisher
8. Ecological Shifts and Anthropogenic Burning in Central California, AD1250–2000 / Anna Klimaszewski-Patterson
9. Environmental Rebound and the Disruption of Indigenous Land Management following European Colonization of Southern New England / Elic M. Weitzel
10. Disease, Social Injustice, and Historical Ecology: Reflections on Archaeology and Environmental Rebounds / Torben Rick

References
List of Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Emily Lena Jones is an associate professor of anthropology and faculty associate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute and Center for Stable Isotopes at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of In Search of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in Paleolithic Southwest Europe. She studies past human-environment interactions through the lens of archaeological animal remains, with a particular interest in the connections between humans, non-human animals, and environmental change.

Jacob L. Fisher is a professor of anthropology and director of the Archaeological Curation Facility at California State University, Sacramento. His interests primarily lie in the role animal resources played in foraging-based societies with secondary research goals in conservation paleobiology and historical ecology.