LATE QUATERNARY ENVIRONMENTS IN THE NORTHERN ROCKY MOUNTAINS: EVIDENCE FROM GEOARCHAEOLOGY, PALEONTOLOGY AND HISTORICAL ECOLOGY

In the Northern Rocky Mountains, Quaternary climate change and human land use have affected physical landscapes and biodiversity. The processes by which environments influence humans and human activities impact the environment are linked to significant questions related to global change, including biodiversity and extinction, land use, and conservation policies. Evidence of late Quaternary environmental change prior to and since the presence of humans can be used in attempts to distinguish natural environmental variability from human (anthropogenic) impacts, in addition to evaluating the ways human activities are directly or indirectly linked to changes in the environment. During the late Pleistocene and for most of the Holocene, climate was the primary factor influencing landscapes and the temporal and spatial distribution of biotic communities in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Studies of Holocene environmental conditions provide an opportunity to evaluate the combined influence of natural climate processes and human activities. Human influence was restricted to resource use connected with prehistoric and proto-historic hunting and gathering for most of the Holocene. During the 1800s long-term changes in landform processes and biodiversity resulted from human activities such as beaver trapping, mining, logging, grazing, agriculture, and changing settlement patterns. Management strategies initiated in the early 1900s, such as the reintroduction of extirpated mammals, have affected biodiversity. The Rocky Mountains presently contain wildland-urban interface areas where human activities are influenced by the geoecologic setting, and intensification of human land use has contributed to environmental change. Relations between people and environment during the Quaternary in the Northern Rocky Mountains are a consequence of patterns of global climate change as well as patterns of local land use. Human-environment interactions in these mountain ecosystems are an outcome of long-term landscape dynamics. The integration of data from paleobiology, geoarchaeology and historical ecology provides a means to examine long-term patterns of landscape dynamics, biodiversity, human activities and their interrelationships in mountain ecosystems.