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The main types of data and methods used to study interlinked human–environment dynamics at different spatial and temporal scales in the fields of conservation and historical ecology.
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The human communities and ecosystems of island and coastal southeast Africa face significant and linked ecological threats. Socioecological conditions of concern to communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and researchers include declining agricultural productivity, deforestation, introductions of non‐native flora and fauna, coastal...
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... Al priorizar la investigación científica empírica, las entidades colonizadoras pueden utilizar nociones occidentales de datos como hechos para anular, borrar y minimizar los sistemas de conocimiento Indígena, descendiente y/o comunitario, así como los reclamos de tierras. (Douglass et al. 2019b;Douglass y Cooper 2020;Leff 2022;Trouillot 1995). Sin embargo, los datos como proporciones producidas por mediciones isotópicas son irrelevantes sin contexto y significados asignados (Grupe 2014, 21). ...
[Se puede encontrar la traducción al mismo lugar del versión ingles: https://doi.org/10.5744/bi.2023.0012]
Los métodos de isótopos estables han aportado conocimientos innovadores sobre los estudios bioarqueológicos sobre la identidad, pero son necesarias perspectivas teóricas más críticas. Inspiradas por y en conversación con la literatura interseccional feminista, Indígena y ambiental, nos interrogamos con y para quién se lleva a cabo dicha investigación. Las potenciales desigualdades en la investigación bioarqueológica que utiliza isótopos incluyen la naturaleza extractiva y especializada de los métodos isotópicos. Además, en el contexto de los estudios de identidad, las nociones occidentales del individuo pueden separar a los humanos de la naturaleza, creando una división artificial entre las personas y el lugar que no siempre existe en otras formas de conocer. Proponemos que las bases de referencias isotópicas pueden crear una práctica más comprometida al considerar la dinámica humana, y el lugar. Mirando hacia un futuro más inclusivo y equitativo para la investigación bioarqueológica e isotópica, proponemos formas de reducir los desequilibrios de poder creados por la investigación isotópica. En última instancia, sugerimos que la recopilación e interpretación de datos ambientales de referencia brinden la oportunidad de reconciliar y expandir las conceptualizaciones de identidad más allá de Occidente.
... It is established that Western scientific practices, including archaeology, have been used to (re)enforce imperialist agendas by controlling historical narratives (Deloria 1969(Deloria , 1995Gänger 2008;Trouillot 1995). In prioritizing empirical scientific inquiry, colonizing entities may use Western notions of data as facts to overrule, erase, and minimize Indigenous, descendant, and community knowledge systems, as well as land claims (Douglass et al. 2019b;Douglass and Cooper 2020;Leff 2022;Trouillot 1995). However, data, like the ratios produced by isotopic measurements, are irrelevant without context and assigned meanings (Grupe 2014: 21). ...
Isotopic methods have provided breakthrough insights into bioarchaeological identity studies, yet merit more critical theoretical perspectives. Inspired by and in conversation with intersectional feminist, Indigenous, and environmental literatures, we interrogate with and for whom such research is conducted. Potential inequities in bioarchaeological research using isotopes include the extractive and specialized nature of isotopic methods. Additionally, in the context of identity studies, Western notions of the individual may separate humans from nature, creating an artificial division between people and place. We propose isotopic baselines may create a more engaged practice by considering living human dynamics and place. Looking toward a more inclusive and equitable future for bioarchaeological and isotopic research, we propose ways to reduce power imbalances. Ultimately, we suggest the collection and interpretation of environmental baseline data provide an opportunity to reconcile and expand conceptualizations of identity beyond the West.
... It is time we speak to those most in need of the data we can provide and that we not only produce, but also use those data in the service of conservation biology." Numerous papers, by both archaeologists and transdisciplinary teams, are now published in conservation/management, ecology/biology, or interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Braje et al. 2009Braje et al. , 2015Douglass et al. 2019;Lyman 2012;Randklev et al. 2010;West et al. 2017;Wolverton et al. 2007). Although they are often focused on local or regional issues, conservation biology and environmental sustainability are global issues. ...
... Island archaeology, especially on Madagascar, has largely focused on "first contact" events and subsequent environmental change (e.g., Anderson et al. 2018;Hansford et al. 2018;Mitchell 2019;Vérin et al. 1969; exceptions include Deschamps 1959). Research on Madagascar has revealed that such studies, while important for establishing migration chronologies, do little to advance understanding about post-arrival mobility and settlement patterns (Douglass, Walz, et al. 2019;Douglass and Zinke 2015). The hyper-focus on the "first" or "earliest" inhabitants of the island have resulted in primarily "site-based" archaeological investigations that lack regional contexts for later periods of human occupation (e.g., Dewar et al. 2013;Gommery et al. 2011;Hansford et al. 2018;Heurtebize and Vérin 1974;Vérin 1971). ...
... The archaeology of the VMPA is a recent development, with the first comprehensive investigation of the area starting in 2011 by Douglass (2016). Douglass' work focuses on the excavation of six different areas around the modern village of Andavadoake, where she describes several open air and rock shelter sites occupied between 3000 B.P. and the present (Douglass 2016(Douglass , 2017Douglass et al. 2019). Her work presents a more targeted analysis, however, of contexts dated between 1400 -100 BP (Douglass et al. 2018). ...
... Andavadoake is the largest village within the VMPA and serves as the basecamp for the Morombe Archaeological Project (MAP), which is a collaborative community archaeology team established by Kristina Douglass in 2011 (Douglass 2016;Douglass, Morales, et al. 2019). Within this dissertation, I worked closely with the MAP team to develop research questions, plan and execute fieldwork operations, and output the results in the form of presentations, workshops, and publications. ...
People on Madagascar have coped with environmental change for millennia. Present-day environmental change, however, is negatively impacting the livelihoods and sustainability of coastal communities on Madagascar. As a result of increasing climate-driven impacts on livelihoods and economic development initiatives, community settlement strategies are shifting towards increased sedentism. This dissertation investigates settlement patterns of mobile foraging populations, their drivers, and ecological effects in Late Holocene Madagascar. Specifically, I investigate environmental links to settlement patterns via remotely sensed environmental and archaeological data and radiocarbon chronology from identified archaeological deposits. While most studies of settlement distribution focus on socioecological drivers, in this project I also devote attention to the ecological legacy effects of human settlement by looking at the geochemical and spectral properties of archaeologically inhabited areas. In this way, this dissertation seeks a holistic understanding of settlement distribution in Southwest Madagascar extending from its driving forces to its long-lasting effects on ecological systems. Using a predictive modeling protocol rooted in ideal distribution models from human behavioral ecology, I use machine learning algorithms to extract culturally significant environmental variables from Sentinel-2 satellite images. These data then aid in exploring the degree to which resource distribution is correlated with settlement density, whether Allee effects account for settlement patterns, and the resulting ecological impact of foraging activity on the Malagasy landscape over thousands of years. Identified cultural deposits are visited during ground investigations to survey and excavate different areas to acquire temporal information (e.g., 14C dates, ceramics, etc.). Based on this newly generated archaeological settlement record, these data are incorporated into spatial point process models (PPMs), a form of regression analysis, of archaeological settlements to investigate the relationship between environmental conditions and settlement distributions. PPMs help to reveal external ecological relationships as well as dispersive or cohesive properties between archaeological points. Finally, using an automated remote sensing procedure employing a combination of Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery and random forest models, I quantify the extent of cultural niche construction resulting from foraging communities in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area in southwest Madagascar since the Late Holocene. Altogether, this dissertation demonstrates that foraging communities in Late Holocene Madagascar settled the landscape according to the principles of an ideal free distribution with Allee effects, meaning that a strong mix between environmental and social factors, including active landscape modification (or niche construction) drove settlement choice. Specifically, the presence of freshwater sources, community defense, and social cohesion were among the most significant drivers of settlement patterns, followed by marine resource access (i.e., coral reefs). Additionally, it appears that almost 20% of the Velondriake region has been anthropogenically modified, demonstrating that foraging communities leave quantifiable and long-lasting impacts on ecological systems. Over the last millennium, communities in the Velondriake region have maintained close social connections, which have shifted geographically over the last several hundred years. Settlements appear to reflect a variety of long-term and seasonal occupations that exploited a variety of marine habitats including coastal coral reefs, oceans, and mangrove forests.
... High landscape degradation on Madagascar is an emergent property of complex, multi-scalar factors that are linked to population density, high tree loss anomalies, and land use change ( Table 1; Table S1). Jarosz, 1993;Hending et al., 2018;Zaehringer et al., 2015); (2) subsistence-oriented cultivation centred on rain-fed rice, and shaped by population increases and land access instabilities since at least the colonial period (Douglass, Walz, et al., 2019;Jarosz, 1993;Moser, 2008;Zaehringer et al., 2016); and ...
Narratives of landscape degradation are often linked to unsustainable fire use by local communities. Madagascar is a case in point: the island is considered globally exceptional, with its remarkable endemic biodiversity viewed as threatened by unsustainable anthropogenic fire. Yet, fire regimes on Madagascar have not been empirically characterised or globally contextualised. Here, we contribute a comparative approach to determining relationships between regional fire regimes and global patterns and trends, applied to Madagascar using MODIS remote sensing data (2003–2019). Rather than a global exception, we show that Madagascar's fire regimes are similar to 88% of tropical burned area with shared climate and vegetation characteristics, and can be considered a microcosm of most tropical fire regimes. From 2003–2019, landscape-scale fire declined across tropical grassy biomes (17%–44% excluding Madagascar), and on Madagascar at a relatively fast rate (36%–46%). Thus, high tree loss anomalies on the island (1.25–4.77× the tropical average) were not explained by any general expansion of landscape-scale fire in grassy biomes. Rather, tree loss anomalies centred in forests, and could not be explained by landscape-scale fire escaping from savannas into forests. Unexpectedly, the highest tree loss anomalies on Madagascar (4.77×) occurred in environments without landscape-scale fire, where the role of small-scale fires (<21 h [0.21 km2]) is unknown. While landscape-scale fire declined across tropical grassy biomes, trends in tropical forests reflected important differences among regions, indicating a need to better understand regional variation in the anthropogenic drivers of forest loss and fire risk. Our new understanding of Madagascar's fire regimes offers two lessons with global implications: first, landscape-scale fire is declining across tropical grassy biomes and does not explain high tree loss anomalies on Madagascar. Second, landscape-scale fire is not uniformly associated with tropical forest loss, indicating a need for socio-ecological context in framing new narratives of fire and ecosystem degradation.
... We examined physical (X-ray fluorescence and stratigraphy) and biotic indicators (pollen, diatoms and microand macro-charcoal particles) in the sediment record to explore past terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem change. Integration of paleoecological, archaeological, and historical data is crucial for developing holistic perspectives on the timing and socioecological consequences of human land use in insular ecosystems (Braje et al., 2017;Douglass et al., 2019b). The following research questions were tested in this study: (a) Did increasing fire frequency during dry/wet periods induce changes in vegetation composition? ...
... A similar FIGURE 8 | Abbreviated paleoecological diagram for the last ∼1,145 years, inferred from the Namonte core, southwest Madagascar. (A) Pollen percentages of disturbance taxa, grasslands, and dry forest, (B) percentages of diatom guilds, (C) PCA1 and PCA2 of XRF analysis, (D) Influx of macrocharcoal and microcharcoal particles, (E) Precipitation reconstruction from the Rodrigues Island, Indian Ocean, speleothem δ 18 O record (Li et al., 2020), and (F) chronology of faunal turnover (based on classical confidence intervals from Hixon et al., 2021a) and approximate human history based on archaeological, written and oral records (Douglass et al., 2019b). vegetation trend was recorded at Lake Longiza, where grasslands expanded in association with an abrupt increase in charcoal particles and coprophilous fungi between 580 and 30 cal yr BP (Razanatsoa et al., 2021b). ...
Madagascar’s biota underwent substantial change following human colonization of the island in the Late Holocene. The timing of human arrival and its role in the extinction of megafauna have received considerable attention. However, the impacts of human activities on regional ecosystems remain poorly studied. Here, we focus on reconstructing changes in the composition of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to evaluate the impact of human land use and climate variability. We conducted a paleoenvironmental study, using a sediment record that spans the last ∼1,145 years, collected from a lakebed in the Namonte Basin of southwest Madagascar. We examined physical (X-ray fluorescence and stratigraphy) and biotic indicators (pollen, diatoms and micro- and macro-charcoal particles) to infer terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem change. The fossil pollen data indicate that composition of grasslands and dry deciduous forest in the region remained relatively stable during an arid event associated with northward displacement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) between ∼1,145 and 555 calibrated calendar years before present (cal yr BP). Charcoal particles indicate that widespread fires occurred in the region, resulting from a combination of climate drivers and human agency during the entire span covered by the paleorecord. Following settlement by pastoral communities and the disappearance of endemic megafauna ∼1,000 cal yr BP, grasslands expanded and the abundance of trees that rely on large animals for seed dispersal gradually declined. A reduction in the abundance of pollen taxa characteristic of dry forest coincided with an abrupt increase in charcoal particles between ∼230 and 35 cal yr BP, when agro-pastoral communities immigrated into the region. Deforestation and soil erosion, indicated by a relatively rapid sedimentation rate and high K/Zr and Fe/Zr, intensified between 180 and 70 cal yr BP and caused a consequent increase in lake turbidity, resulting in more rapid turnover of the aquatic diatom community. Land use and ongoing climate change have continued to transform local terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems during the last ∼70 years. The current composition of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems reflects the legacy of extinction of native biota, invasion of exotic species, and diminished use of traditional land management practices.
... Interdisciplinary studies of historical ecology and political ecology have significant implications for modern food and water security and community resilience and recovery, and influence current policies around resource management and biodiversity (Braje et al. 2017;Douglass et al. 2018;Robbins et al. 2015;Shaw 2018). For example, in 1955 the Forestry Department reported a deficit of almost 1.2 million rupees; the state must have recognized alternative benefits to maintaining forested crown land despite these losses. ...
In this study I trace the historical political ecology of Bras d’Eau, a nineteenth-century colonial sugar estate, twentieth-century forest plantation, and contemporary National Park in Mauritius. Via archaeological studies, documentary records, reconstruction of ecological landscapes, and ethnographic interviews, the study shows how environmental and climatic ideologies, structures of power and inequality, and community values intersected to produce the built environment of today’s National Park. Despite massive deforestation and degradation caused by colonial and postcolonial ecological strategies, newly formed forest reserves have become integral to island and community resilience.
... Most archaeologists will not be surprised by United Nation's IPCC 2021 report. The effects of climate change on biodiversity loss, destruction of archaeological sites, food insecurity, population displacement, and sociopolitical conflicts are recognizable in many of our research areas (e.g., Douglass et al., 2019;Logan et al., 2019). Hence, archaeologists have been at the forefront of calling attention to the climate crisis and using archaeology's long-term perspectives as a framework for finding sustainable solutions (e.g., Chase & Scarborough, 2014;Rick & Sandweiss, 2020). ...
... Water scarcity, exacerbated by colonial legacies of land dispossession [1], has left subsistence farmers and pastoralists in the grip of famine in southern Madagascar [2], and climate change simulations suggest that the region will experience more periods of severe drought during the next century [3]. Paired records of past climate change and biotic responses to such fluctuations can identify vulnerability to drought and inform management plans designed to promote human and ecosystem health [4]. The goal of this study was to use multiple analyses of ancient lake sediments and herbivore bone collagen to assess the past response of animals to drought and infer drivers of past megafaunal extinction. ...
Climate drying could have transformed ecosystems in southern Madagascar during recent millennia by contributing to the extinction of endemic megafauna. However, the extent of regional aridification during the past 2000 years is poorly known, as are the responses of endemic animals and economically important livestock to drying. We inferred ~1600 years of climate change around Lake Ranobe, SW Madagascar, using oxygen isotope analyses of monospecific freshwater ostracods (Bradleystrandesia cf. fuscata) and elemental analyses of lake core sediment. We inferred past changes in habitat and diet of introduced and extinct endemic megaherbivores using bone collagen stable isotope and 14C datasets (n = 63). Extinct pygmy hippos and multiple giant lemur species disappeared from the vicinity of Ranobe during a dry interval ~1000–700 cal yr BP, but the simultaneous appearance of introduced cattle, high charcoal concentrations, and other evidence of human activity confound inference of drought-driven extirpations. Unlike the endemic megafauna, relatively low collagen stable nitrogen isotope values among cattle suggest they survived dry intervals by exploiting patches of wet habitat. Although megafaunal extirpations coincided with drought in SW Madagascar, coupled data from bone and lake sediments do not support the hypothesis that extinct megafauna populations collapsed solely because of drought. Given that the reliance of livestock on mesic patches will become more important in the face of projected climate drying, we argue that sustainable conservation of spiny forests in SW Madagascar should support local livelihoods by ensuring that zebu have access to mesic habitat. Additionally, the current interactions between pastoralism and riparian habitats should be studied to help conserve the island’s biodiversity.
... of coastal archaeological sites, specifically, can improve our understanding of how humans respond to environmental changes with a deep-time perspective, and this information can then be applied to contemporary situations (Douglass et al. 2019;Douglass and Cooper 2020;Kittinger et al. 2015; also see Davis 2019b;Kelly 2016). ...
Climate change and anthropogenic activities are actively destroying the archaeological record. The dramatic disappearance of archaeological landscapes becomes particularly problematic when they are also unrecorded. Hidden from view and eroding, these disappearing landscapes likely hold answers to important anthropological questions. As such, disappearing landscapes present a major challenge for twenty-first century archaeology. Left unchecked, this phenomenon will increase the severity of bias in our knowledge of the past. In this paper we use a case study from Pinckney Island in the American Southeast to illustrate how the problem of hidden and disappearing landscapes can be addressed through multi-scalar surveys. Specifically, by combining aerial LiDAR, pedestrian survey, and micro-artifact approaches, the identification of hidden and disappearing cultural materials (including permanent settlements and ephemeral artifact scatters) can be alleviated.
