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S. Yoshi Maezumi

S. Yoshi Maezumi
Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

PhD

About

70
Publications
41,442
Reads
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2,613
Citations
Introduction
I am a tropical Palaeoecologist and Archaeologist specializing in the evolution of human-environment interactions. My research focuses on the legacy of Indigenous cultural burning, crop cultivation, and agroforestry in ecosystems in the Amazon Basin and the Caribbean Islands. http://yoshimaezumi.wixsite.com/paleoecology
Additional affiliations
July 2018 - present
The University of the West Indies at Mona
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • Courses Taught - Climate Change in the Tropics - Environmental Change - Earth Environments - Climate and the Biosphere
September 2015 - June 2018
University of Exeter
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • Courses Taught - Archaeology Forensic Practical - Archaeological Methods in Paleoecology - Sustainability and Collapse - Archaeobotany: Pollen Analysis, C2 - Advanced Research Methods Paleoecology
May 2015 - June 2018
University of Exeter
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • Paleoecological reconstructions of pre-Columbian land use and fire management in the Amazon.
Education
August 2010 - May 2015
University of Utah
Field of study
  • Physical Geography: Paleoecology
September 2007 - May 2010
California State University
Field of study
  • Archaeology: Analytical Archaeology
September 2003 - June 2006
University of California, San Diego
Field of study
  • Religious Studies

Publications

Publications (70)
Article
Full-text available
This is a reply to the comments of Penna [1] and Feller [2] on our paper “The Curse of Conservation: empirical evidence demonstrating that changes in land-use legislation drove catastrophic bushfires in Southeast Australia” [3]. Penna [1] and Feller [2] present a series of critiques of our data and narrative that we summarise under two central them...
Article
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The triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss necessitates more holistic, comprehensive, and integrated public policy approaches. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this crisis highlights significant conflicts over forms of knowledge and conceptualization, affecting how international...
Article
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It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this revie...
Article
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It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this revie...
Article
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The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future1–3. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time4,5. Here we synthesized resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric population time–frequency data, span...
Book
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This Element addresses a burning question – how can archaeologists best identify and interpret cultural burning, the controlled use of fire by people to shape and curate their physical and social landscapes? This Element describes what cultural burning is and presents current methods by which it can be identified in historical and archaeological re...
Book
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O sul do Brasil tem uma presença de longa duração das sociedades Jê, os atuais Kaingang e Xokleng. Estes povos criaram paisagens compostas por uma diversidade de lugares e espaços de coexistência e circulação com diferentes funcionalidades, que interagem entre si por meio de uma estrutura sociocosmológica própria. Ao longo de mais de 2000 anos de h...
Chapter
Nas terras altas do sul do Brasil, uma expansão antropogênica da floresta ocorreu em detrimento dos campos entre 1410 e 900 cal anos AP, coincidindo com um período de mudança demográfica e cultural na região. Estudos anteriores debateram as contribuições relativas ao aumento das condições climáticas mais úmidas e quentes e as modificações humanas d...
Chapter
Informação Suplementar do capítulo "Separando Fatores Humanos e Climáticos na Mudança de Vegetação do Holoceno Tardio no Sul do Brasil"
Conference Paper
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Climate variability, especially monsoonal rainfall, has significantly shaped habitable areas for human populations in South Asia in the past just as it does today. Instances of climate-driven social disruptions and population movements are evident worldwide, as evidenced for example in the Classic Maya and the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Howev...
Article
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The duration and maximum combustion temperature of vegetation fires are important fire properties with implications for ecology, hydrology, hazard potential, and many other processes. Directly measuring maximum combustion temperature during vegetation fires is difficult. However, chemical transformations associated with temperature are reflected in...
Article
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Background The global human footprint has fundamentally altered wildfire regimes, creating serious consequences for human health, biodiversity, and climate. However, it remains difficult to project how long-term interactions among land use, management, and climate change will affect fire behavior, representing a key knowledge gap for sustainable ma...
Article
With more people now living in urban areas than outside of them, urbanism is becoming an increasingly important socioeconomic and ecological arena for our species in the twenty-first century. Understanding historical and regional variation in urban trajectories and land use has the potential to provide long-term perspectives on pressing contemporar...
Article
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The Amazon Rainforest Ecotone (the ARF-Ecotone) of the southwestern Amazon Basin is a transitional landscape from tropical evergreen rainforests and seasonally flooded savannahs to savannah woodlands and semi-deciduous dry forests. While fire activity plays an integral role in ARF-Ecotones, recent interactions between human activity and increased t...
Preprint
Full-text available
The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time. We present results of the first attempt to synthesise resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric populati...
Article
Full-text available
Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Mo...
Article
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Tropical forests are changing in composition and productivity, probably in response to changes in climate and disturbances. The responses to these multiple environmental drivers, and the mechanisms underlying the changes, remain largely unknown. Here, we use a functional trait approach on timescales of 10,000 years to assess how climate and disturb...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human activity has fundamentally altered wildfire on Earth, creating serious consequences for human health, global biodiversity, and climate change. However, it remains difficult to predict fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change, representing a serious knowledge gap and vulnerability. We used expert assessment to combine op...
Article
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Protecting “wilderness” and removing human involvement in “nature” was a core pillar of the modern conservation movement through the 20th century. Conservation approaches and legislation informed by this narrative fail to recognise that Aboriginal people have long valued, used, and shaped most landscapes on Earth. Aboriginal people curated open and...
Article
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Human beings are an active component of every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Although our local impact on the evolution of these ecosystems has been undeniable and extensively documented, it remains unclear precisely how our activities are altering them, in part because ecosystems are dynamic systems structured by complex, non-linear feedback proc...
Article
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Despite decades of archaeological research on Jamaica, little is known about how settlers influenced landscape change on the island over time. Here, we examine the impact of human occupation through a multi-proxy approach using phytolith, charcoal, and stratigraphic analyses. White Marl was a continuously inhabited village settlement (ca. 1050–450...
Article
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Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire...
Article
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Since Darwin, studies of human evolution have tended to give primacy to open ‘savannah’ environments as the ecological cradle of our lineage, with dense tropical forests cast as hostile, unfavourable frontiers. These perceptions continue to shape both the geographical context of fieldwork as well as dominant narratives concerning hominin evolution....
Article
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The southwestern Amazon Rainforest Ecotone (ARE) is the transitional landscape between the tropical forest and seasonally flooded savannahs of the Bolivian Llanos de Moxos. These heterogeneous landscapes harbour high levels of biodiversity and some of the earliest records of human occupation and plant domestication in Amazonia. While persistent Ind...
Article
The paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental history of the Amazon basin over the last millennia and the behavior of the South American Monsoon System (SAMS) throughout the lowlands have not yet been thoroughly examined due to a lack of records from more central portions of the basin. Here we discuss these past changes based on new high-resolution d 18...
Article
Full-text available
Background Fire is known to affect forest biodiversity, carbon storage, and public health today; however, comparable fire histories from across forest regions in the Amazon basin are lacking. Consequently, the degree to which past fires could have preconditioned modern forest resilience to fire remains unknown. Aim We characterised the long-term (...
Article
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The catastrophic 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires were the worst fire season in the recorded history of Southeast Australia. These bushfires were one of several recent global conflagrations across landscapes that are homelands of Indigenous peoples, homelands that were invaded and colonised by European nations over recent centuries. The subsequent...
Article
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Charcoal identification and the quantification of its abundance in sedimentary archives is commonly used to reconstruct fire frequency and the amounts of biomass burning. There are, however, limited metrics to measure past fire temperature and fuel type (i.e. the types of plants that comprise the fuel load), which are important for fully understand...
Article
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The Amazon forest is increasingly vulnerable to dieback and encroachment of grasslands and agricultural fields. Threats to these forested ecosystems include drying, deforestation, and fire, but feedbacks among these make it difficult to determine their relative importance. Here, we reconstruct the central and western Amazon tree cover response to a...
Article
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Pre-Columbian reforestation in Amazonia An early 17th-century temporary reduction in global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels was previously attributed to reforestation in Amazonia after the catastrophic loss of life of the indigenous population caused by diseases brought by European invaders. Using fossil pollen data from Amazonian lake se...
Article
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Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; however, Indigenous farming activity may have also shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. The Fish Lake Plateau is located on the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau boundary, the only region in western North America where maize farming was adopted th...
Preprint
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First described over 120 years ago in Brazil, Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are expanses of dark soil that are exceptionally fertile and contain large quantities of archaeological artefacts. The elevated fertility of the dark and often deep A horizon of ADEs is widely regarded as an outcome of pre-Columbian human influence. Controversially, in their...
Preprint
Full-text available
Archaeological research provides clear evidence that the widespread formation of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical lowland South America was concentrated in the Late Holocene, an outcome of sharp demographic growth that peaked towards 1000 BP. In their recent paper, however, Silva et al. propose that the high fertility of ADE is not of anthr...
Article
During the last two decades, new archaeological projects which systematically integrate a variety of plant recovery techniques, along with palaeoecology, palaeoclimate, soil science and floristic inventories, have started to transform our understanding of plant exploitation, cultivation and domestication in tropical South America. Archaeobotanical...
Article
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Anthropogenic soils known as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) have long been known as a key component of subsistence systems for various pre‐Columbian Amazonian populations. Often treated as a single category, ADE systems consist of two broad anthrosols (human‐modified soils): the darker ADE (traditionally known as terra preta) and a lighter brown Amaz...
Article
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Fossil pollen records are well-established indicators of past vegetation changes. The prevalence of pollen across environmental settings including lakes, wetlands, and marine sediments, has made palynology one of the most ubiquitous and valuable tools for studying past environmental and climatic change globally for decades. A complementary research...
Article
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Rising sea levels have been associated with human migration and behavioral shifts throughout prehistory, often with an emphasis on landscape submergence and consequent societal collapse. However, the assumption that future sea-level rise will drive similar adaptive responses is overly simplistic. While the change from land to sea represents a drama...
Article
During the last two decades, new archaeological projects which systematically integrate a variety of plant recovery techniques, along with palaeoecology, palaeoclimate, soil science and floristic inventories, have started to transform our understanding of plant exploitation, cultivation and domestication in tropical South America. Archaeobotanical...
Article
In contrast to temperate regions, relationships between basin characteristics (e.g., type/size) and fossil pollen archives have received little attention in Amazonia. Here, we compare fossil pollen records of a small palm swamp (Cuatro Vientos; CV) and a nearby large lake (Laguna Chaplin, LCH) in Bolivian Amazonia, demonstrating that palm swamps ca...
Article
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Aim Amazonian forests predominantly grow on highly weathered and nutrient poor soils. Anthropogenically enriched Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE), traditionally known as Terra Preta de Índio , were formed by pre‐Columbian populations. ADE soils are characterized by increased fertility and have continued to be exploited following European colonization. H...
Article
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Fire is a powerful ecological and evolutionary force that regulates organismal traits, population sizes, species interactions, community composition, carbon and nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. It also presents a rapidly growing societal challenge, due to both increasingly destructive wildfires and fire exclusion in fire‐dependent ecosystem...
Article
The long-term response of ancient societies to climate change has been a matter of global debate. Until recently, the lack of integrative studies using archaeological, palaeoecological and palaeoclimatological data prevented an evaluation of the relationship between climate change, distinct subsistence strategies and cultural transformations across...
Article
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Anthropogenic climate change—combined with increased human-caused ignitions—is leading to increased wildfire frequency, carbon dioxide emissions, and refractory black carbon (rBC) aerosol emissions. This is particularly evident in the Amazon rainforest, where fire activity has been complicated by the synchronicity of natural and anthropogenic drive...
Article
The complexity of maize domestication Maize originated in what is now central Mexico about 9000 years ago and spread throughout the Americas before European contact. Kistler et al. applied genomic analysis to ancient and extant South American maize lineages to investigate the genetic changes that accompanied domestication (see the Perspective by Ze...
Article
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Anthropogenic climate change driven by increased carbon emissions is leading to more severe fire seasons and increasing the frequency of mega-fires in the Amazon. This has the potential to convert Amazon forests from net carbon sinks to net carbon sources. Although modern human influence over the Earth is substantial, debate remains over when human...
Article
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The legacy of pre-Columbian land use on modern Amazonian forests has stimulated considerable debate which, until now, has not been satisfactorily resolved due to the absence of integrated studies between pre-Columbian and modern land use. Here we show an abrupt enrichment of edible forest species combined with the cultivation of multiple annual cro...
Article
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In the highlands of southern Brazil an anthropogenitcally driven expansion of forest occurred at the expense of grasslands between 1410 and 900 cal BP, coincident with a period of demographic and cultural change in the region. Previous studies have debated the relative contributions of increasing wetter and warmer climate conditions and human lands...
Article
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A 50,000-year-old sediment core record from Laguna Chaplin is reanalyzed to explore potential paleoecological methods to detect the extent of pre-Columbian disturbance in the Bolivian Amazon. High-resolution (sub-centennial) macrocharcoal data are analyzed using statistical algorithm software including Regime Shift Detection and CHAR Analysis to de...
Article
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3rd PAGES Young Scientists Meeting; Morillo de Tou, Spain, 7–9 May 2017
Article
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The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Araucaria Moist Forest of southern Brazil is a unique ecological mosaic, dominated by the 'Parana pine' (Araucaria angustifolia), an iconic 'living fossil', dating back to the Mesozoic era. This forest comprises part of the Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot with exceptionally high levels of endemism. Unfortunately, after centuries...
Article
Full-text available
The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire...
Article
Full-text available
Cerrãdo savannas have the greatest fire activity of all major global land-cover types and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. During the 21st century, temperatures are projected to increase by ~ 3 °C coupled with a precipitation decrease of ~ 20%. Although these conditions could potentially intensify drought stress, it is unknown ho...
Article
Full-text available
Cerrãdo savannas have the greatest fire activity of all major global land-cover types and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. During the 21st century, temperatures are predicted to increase by ~ 3 °C coupled with a precipitation decrease of ~ 20%. Although these conditions could potentially intensify drought stress, it is unknown ho...
Article
Full-text available
We synthesize existing sedimentary charcoal records to reconstruct Holocene fire history at regional, continental and global scales. The reconstructions are compared with the two potential controls of burning at these broad scales – changes in climate and human activities – to assess their relative importance on trends in biomass burning. Here we c...

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