Human-modified landscapes

The article shows the burning practices used by native northern hunters-gatherers and reindeer herders of Western Siberia as a potential factor of impact on surrounding landscapes. In this sense, the research focuses primarily on aspects of practical importance in the fields of cultural ecology and ethnoarchaeology. The controlled burning of grass, shrubs, and deadwood has been a very effective landscape management tool, though not a common practice among northern natives of Western Siberia. It helped certain groups of them restore the productivity of berry bushes, attract wild ungulates and create better conditions for reindeer herding and travelling, as well as to protect the territory from devastating forest fires. There are some Western Siberian ethnic groups who traditionally have had more freedom in the use of fire (Evenks) and others whose actions in this field have been rather rigidly regulated by traditional rules and beliefs (Ob Ugrians and Selkups). The Tundra and Forest Nenets probably combined their culture features with both of the mentioned groups. This allows us to suggest a version that a relatively freer use of fire is generally a typical feature of the nomadic population. Several areas were revealed in Western Siberia, where the peoples of the North had practiced intentional burning (or supposedly could do it) in order to obtain additional economic benefit from their lands – the Konda river valley, Upper Taz river area and interfluve of Demyanka and Turtas rivers. The local Khanty and Mansi groups of the Konda river valley adopted this use of fire from the neighboring Siberian Tatars or Russians in 1860-70th. Simultaneously, it was also a real paradigm shift in the spheres of traditional beliefs and land use practices of the Ob-Ugrian communities. The last two areas were associated with local groups of Evenks, the people who were brought into disrepute in Siberia and the Far East as arsonists of the taiga. As ethnographic data shows, on the one hand, this was a prejudiced opinion, on the other hand, there were factors that contributed to its formation.

The Knuckles Mountain Forest Range (KMFR) has a complex mosaic of natural and human modified habitats and the contribution of these habitats to the biological and functional diversities has not been deeply studied. Present study investigated both of these diversities in five habitat types (two natural habitats: Sub-montane forest and Pitawala Patana grassland; three modified habitats: cardamom, pinus and abandoned tea plantations) in Northern Flank of KMFR using birds as the indicator group. Bird communities were surveyed using point count method. A total of 1,150 individuals belonging to 56 species were observed. The highest species richness was reported from the cardamom plantation where as sub-montane forest had the highest feeding guild diversity in terms of Shannon Weiner index. The abandoned tea plantation and the Pitawala Patana grasslands with fairly open habitats, showed relatively lower levels of feeding guild diversities. It is clear that the structurally complex habitats contribute more to the area’s biological and functional diversities and need to be taken into consideration when developing conservation plans.

SUMMARY: Lecture 5 examines the Neolithic period in the Aegean, looking at the end of the Ice Age, transition to the Neolithic, and emergence of the Neolithic in the Aegean (including the settlement of some Aegean islands, such as Crete, and the adoption of domesticated fauna and crops from the Near East). This lecture is designed mainly as an educational resource for college students (i.e., normally posted only on my institution's course website), the public (e.g., people auditing my course), and interested colleagues from other disciplines (to whom I provide copies privately).  I am posting it here, both as a broader access, educational tool, and especially to promote the study of this region and its past societies.  For further knowledge about this region and period, I refer interested parties to the textbooks and other sources from which the materials were extracted (see syllabus), and/or the bibliographies in these works and my online resource guides (see other files in my academia folders).  The lecture summarizes the pertinent materials in the course textbook(s), adding in other data, and furnishing numerous images to clarify information encountered within the textbook(s).  Some generic imagery (usually indicated as such) is posted to aid in transmitting various concepts visually, and/or when a specific image remains not located (temporarily).  I update and revise such lectures each time, with such elective courses normally being taught once every two years.  I try to cover the most current, mainstream views, and usually place summary notes at the end of each lecture alongside some of the key sources used for compiling the ppt.  Over time, each lecture is improved, errors rectified, and additional data placed within the lecture.  These ppt. lectures take many hours to compile, but they have proved useful to many of my more serious students and I hope they can be of benefit to others as well.  My apologies for any errors I may have made, and my liberal usage of educational imagery from professional sources and vetted internet sources (revised Jan., 2024).

Resumo. A apresentação de Estudo de Impacto Ambiental (EIA) é obrigatória em processos de licenciamento ambiental de diversos empreendimentos e para atividades consideradas potencialmente causadoras de significativa degradação ao meio ambiente. O diagnóstico ambiental do local a sofrer intervenção é uma das atividades técnicas que devem ser apresentadas em um EIA e considera, dentre outros parâmetros ambientais, o levantamento da mastofauna. A Companhia Ambiental do Estado de São Paulo (CETESB) é quem norteia tais levantamentos neste estado. O presente estudo revisou o diagnóstico da mastofauna de 20 EIAs iniciados em 2013 e 2014, atentando-se para possíveis deficiências no levantamento e análise de dados. Os resultados observados foram comparados com as diretrizes impostas em documentos legais da CETESB válidos a partir de 2014, para verificar o quanto estes documentos poderiam ser suficientes para minimizar tais deficiências em EIAs futuros. As principais deficiências encontradas foram a (1) não realização de levantamentos em campo, (2) listas de espécies incompletas, (3) não declaração sobre a forma e local de registro das espécies em campo, (4) ausência de caracterização da assembleia de mamíferos amostrada, (5) não declaração do esforço e suficiência amostral realizado, (6) ausência de análises quantitativas, bem como (7) ausência de comparação dos resultados obtidos com áreas similares. Argumenta-se que as quatro primeiras deficiências poderão ser evitadas em trabalhos futuros com os documentos legais vigentes na CETESB. Porém, as três restantes permanecerão, pois não há orientações robustas e claras nestes documentos sobre tais temas. Logo, salienta-se a necessidade de adequações nestes documentos e que o corpo técnico da CETESB continue atento nas avaliações dos diagnósticos realizados em EIAs no estado.

The paper reveals the main directions and key features of the indigenous landscape management in the northern part of Western Siberia. This transformation activity has included controlled burning, changing hydrology, tree girdling and cutting, reindeer grazing, and digging. It was found out that some of the forms of indigenous activity
(as controlled burning, changing hydrology and tree girding) has had rather limited coverage. Traditional beliefs that support certain practices aimed at changing environmental conditions, or on the contrary – hindering such activities, have played a significant role in this regard. As a result, the northern natives of Western Siberia has
historically had two parallel, fundamentally different approaches to environmental management, each of which has been ideologically supported by a certain type of worldview. Accordingly, there have been cultural barriers to the wide dissemination of the activities directly aimed at changing landscapes, and if the adoption of such practices had occurred, it would have been invariably accompanied by a paradigm shift in the traditional beliefs.

Landscape archaeology has been one of the most prominent fields where post-processual approaches, such as phenomenology, have been applied to. Unsurprisingly, however, these have been more directed towards the study of prehistoric landscapes (e.g. Tilley 1994; Parker-Pearson et al. 2006) for which no textual information exists on religion or ritual.
Despite the opportunity that our knowledge of Roman belief systems presents, examples of studies tackling the Roman perception and conceptual adaptation of the landscape are still rare. Roman Landscapes have been considered projections of the Roman ideal territory (López 1994) and examples exist of foundation rituals (Carandini 2007, Magli 2008), which involved the conceptual division and conceptualisation of the city and its territory. If Roman landscapes are considered as embodying the ‘platonic’ idea of Roman territory, they can provide an unsuspecting window to the Roman conceptualisation of their environment and to Roman views of the world.
Relatively recent methodological approaches and tools, such as GIS, virtual reconstructions and remote sensing can offer new ways to explore these questions. Their application, however, has not been without problems while the focus still remains on earlier periods.
This session will invite papers presenting case-studies on Roman landscapes from different perspectives and employing a variety of techniques, which show or aim to investigate the ideological background behind Roman territorial organisation, environmental change and/or landscape exploitation. These will attempt to provide evidence not just on Roman culturally-determined practices, but also on the way Romans conceptualised their world.

Ethnographic accounts document widespread use of low-intensity surface fires by California's Native Americans to manage terrestrial resources, yet the effects of such practices on forest composition and structure remain largely unknown. Although numerous paleoenvironmental studies debate whether proxy interpretations indicate climatic or anthropogenic drivers of landscape change, available data sources (e.g., pollen, charcoal) are generally insufficient to resolve anthropogenic impacts and do not allow for hypothesis testing. We use a modeling approach with LANDIS-II, a spatially explicit forest succession and disturbance model, to test whether the addition of Native American–set surface fires was necessary to approximate vegetation change as reconstructed from fossil pollen. We use an existing 1,600-year pollen and charcoal record from Holey Meadow, Sequoia National Forest, California, as the empirical data set to which we compared modeled results of climatic and anthropogenic fire regimes. We found that the addition of anthropogenic burning best approximated fossil pollen–reconstructed vegetation change, particularly during periods of prolonged cooler, wetter periods coinciding with greater regional Native American activity (1550–1050 and 750–100 cal yr BP). For lightning-caused wildfires to statistically approximate the pollen record required at least twenty times more ignitions and 870 percent more area burned annually during the Little Ice Age (750–100 cal yr BP) than observed during the modern period (AD 1985–2006), a level of natural fire increase we consider highly improbable. These results demonstrate that (1) anthropogenic burning was likely an important cause of pre-Columbian forest structure at the site and (2) dynamic landscape models provide a valuable method for testing hypotheses of paleoenvironmental change.

The article highlights the main motifs and forms of human impact on the landscape of the indigenous peoples of the North of Russia. I especially focus on hydraulic earthworks which regarded as one of the most important forms of human impact on a landscape by its consequences. There is a quite clearly localized area where the natives of Western Siberia traditionally carried out this kind of activity – the Lower Irtysh valley, the territory of residence of the Southern Khanty and Siberian Tatars. It put forward the version that the practice of digging canals and creation of artificial cutoff was assumed by the Southern Khanty from the Siberian Tatars. What is more, there were adopted not only new skills but also very special cultural traditions, changing the very paradigm of nature use.

In archaeological literature, there are diverse and even contradictory uses of “anthropogenic,” a word appropriated from environmental studies and a term increasingly used in the last 15 years as a sort of conceptual duct-tape for phenomena between the traditional terms “artifact,” “ecofact,” and “feature.” On mapping the flexible uses of “anthropogenism,” I realized its general denotation as “human modification and influence” could mean many things to different archaeologists, carrying different combinations of and degrees of causality, intentionality, modification, and scale. While this diversity exists in the general idea of anthropogenism, many archaeologists view anthropogenic vegetation as simply cultivars or any ‘tooled’ modification. This poster reconciles the diverse views towards anthropogenism and applies them in a classification system for anthropogenic vegetation, which allows for phenomena that can be innately and contextually related to human activities in the environment. Without which, archaeologists may overlook the data potential of certain anthropogenic phenomena over others.