Collins Conference Room
Working Group
  US Mountain Time
 

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

Meeting Description:  While a great deal of archaeological and anthropological research has explored how humans have interacted with various plant, animal, and other taxa, there has been no systematic or comprehensive assessments of the full array of such interactions for particular systems. The closest have been recent studies on how pre-industrial humans fit into complex food webs in the Aleutian Islands and in Ancient Pueblo systems in the Southwest U.S. However, humans interact with species in many non-trophic ways as well. Compilation, comparative analysis, and modeling of such data for multiple systems would provide new opportunities to understand the structure, dynamics, and stability of coupled natural-human systems across space and time. Building on an ongoing, NSF-funded effort to compare how Polynesians interacted with plant and animal species on multiple islands in French Polynesia over 1000 years of human presence, this working group is meeting for the second time to extend this type of analysis to several other promising pre-industrial or non-industrial systems, specifically the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Southwestern US, North Atlantic islands, the Western desert of Australia, and Central Europe.

Purpose: 
Research Collaboration
SFI Host: 
Jennifer Dunne

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