HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS AT REGIONAL TO CONTINENTAL SCALES

Quantifying the extent of human impact on the landscape prior to European arrival in North America remains a challenge. There is currently a need for more information about human population density and land-use through time, to determine possible impacts on the North American ecosystem through the Holocene. Although the broad outlines of the postglacial migration and ranges of the major tree taxa have been mapped, there is a need for detail about the nature of the vegetation, for example, ecosystem parameters such as plant production or fire regime. It is possible to study human-environmental interactions at regional to continental scales using databases assembled from many different sources.

We use the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD), which contains thousands of archaeological radiocarbon dates from across North America, to better understand human impact on the landscape. Frequency distributions of radiocarbon dates may be used as an index of human settlement density and paleo-population size. Pollen and other paleoecological records from databases such as NEOTOMA are used to reconstruct past climate and vegetation.

In this presentation, we will discuss the CARD database, as well as other paleoenvironmental databases containing data suitable for analysis at regional to continental scales. Case studies illustrating the interaction of human activity on the landscape and how past climate changes have impacted population size will be presented.