History of Human Environmental Impacts
Humans exist as active members of an ecosystem. There is increasing awareness that human actions have changed the environment and continue to do so. While ecologists, climatologists, and engineers work to address current and future environmental problems, the discipline of archaeology can provide a time depth and cross-cultural breadth of perspective on how such issues have impacted human societies.
In this course students will:
1) Learn how humans have engaged with their environments over the course of our species' evolutionary history;
2) Critically assess contemporary discussions of collapse and ecocide by contextualizing human-environment interactions within the frameworks of resilience, niche construction, and ecosystem engineering;
3) Use 'lessons from the past' to inform contemporary ecological debates;
4) Objectively evaluate the factual basis of various claims made about how humans affect, have affected, and likely will affect their environments;
5) Actively engage with the community to build sustainable gardens.
Zooarchaeology
This course introduces students to the theory and methods of zooarchaeology through lectures, readings, and hands-on lab work identifying and analyzing faunal (animal) skeletal material. In doing so, students will learn what fauna recovered from archaeological sites tell us about the biological and cultural evolution of human behavior.
Students will have dedicated lab time to learn to identify species based on the bony anatomy, to recognize osteological adaptations for various ecological niches and associated behaviors (e.g., digging, swimming, or running), and to recognize and document modifications to bone by humans, carnivores, and other taphonomic factors.
For example, zooarchaeological analysis has been used to address such issues as the relative reliance on hunting or scavenging by our early ancestors, the evidence for cannibalism in human prehistory, and the origins of animal domestication.
In turn, the course will focus on how the zooarchaeologist can use such analyses to reconstruct past environments and to reconstruct the activities that took place at archaeological and paleontological sites, or to differentiate human from animal remains in forensic cases.
