The Role of Archaeology in Restoration

By Autumn Lovell on February 19, 2010 From Restoration campaign

There are multiple ways that archaeology helps when it comes to protecting the environment. When it comes to restoration, it’s the science that makes the difference between success and failure, and archaeology can bring insights into what an ancient place looked like, how humans have impacted the area since then, and what we all need to learn if we are ever going to build a sustainable future for the people of today. One of the first things archaeology can do is look at the individual stories of ancient groups of people.

Ancient stories revealed in the archaeological record are more technically termed “case studies.” These individual lessons can teach us a great deal about what went wrong and right for the societies of the past:

  • The salitification of soils in Sumer has relevance today, when California and other places face the same issue of salt buildup caused by too much irrigation.
  • The deforestation of Rapa Nui can remind us all that although our Earth is a much larger island, we still have finite resources.
  • The unending battle with erosion fought by the Khmer and the ancient Pueblo people can teach us how to better utilize our rivers and water sources.

These are only some example of the rich depth of knowledge we can delve into when we turn our eyes towards archaeology for answers to the problems that plague us today.

Case studies are supported by many smaller processes in the field of archaeology, and many of these processes themselves are invaluable to restoration efforts. One of these processes is midden research.

Middens are ancient trash piles. Those made by the early Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest usually contain thousands of shells from clams, oysters and other seafood, discarded in an organized manner as the early community hunted and consumed them.

By examining them, we can learn an incredible amount of information about how people lived, how much they ate, even what diseases may have plagued them. It’s all there in the trash. There are middens on the American continent that can give us information dating back more than ten millennia.

The shifting baseline

These depositories of early human activity are also an amazing resource for examining the ancient environment.

Since around 2006 abalone fishermen have been working with the California Department of Fish and Game to measure current red abalone populations to determine if they can reopen the Channel Island abalone fishery. Although the efforts to obtain modern data are crucial to the decision, they only provide half the picture. Archaeologist Todd Braje and his research team are providing the rest.

As an undergraduate at the University of Oregon I worked with Professor Braje on the cutting edge of environmental archaeology, utilizing intensive midden studies from the Channel Island chain off the California coast.. Hours of time went into counting, sorting, measuring, and cataloging red abalone samples pried loose from the ancient midden mounds. The purpose of all this research was simple: to illustrate exactly what a healthy red abalone population should look like, and to discover the importance of the Channel Island habitats to the giant shellfish.

There is something in restoration and conservation called the shifting baseline system:  if we don’t know precisely what a healthy population looks like then we define it based on estimates. Those estimates are usually slanted towards the benefit of re-opening fisheries, rather than towards conservation efforts. If we want effective conservation and restoration, then we have to know what the true baseline is, and that’s where Professor Braje comes in.

Todd Braje, an energetic young archaeologist at Humboldt State University, takes a longer view; he believes it may be possible to glimpse ancient abalone populations that lived as much as 12,000 years ago. “If we’re going to remedy the shifting baseline syndrome,” he says, “we need to look as far back in time as we can.” (From OnEarth.org)

The effort to establish a true baseline is crucial to the effective restoration of any species. Once the healthy population has been defined, then everyone involved has an effective and tangible goal to work towards. In the case of Professor Braje’s research on the Channel Islands, he was able to discover that San Miguel Island is a red-abalone nursery. The population there is strong even when it’s weak in other parts of the region because it’s so crucial to the shellfish.

This find was significant for two key reasons. First, strong red abalone populations near San Miguel had been one of the factors that many fishermen were pointing too, claiming that large numbers of red abalone near San Miguel was a sign of population rebound, when in fact, the San Miguel was literally the last stronghold of the struggling species. Proving that protecting the red abalone at that location was crucial to restocking populations all over the region was a critical piece to the conservation puzzle.

Although Professor Braje’s work is amazing in and of itself, he’s part of a larger archaeological movement to become involved in restoration and conservation efforts around the globe.

“Important clues have come, for example, from the bones and scales of great cod and sturgeon, caught hundreds of years ago on the banks of the North Atlantic, and from eighteenth-century ships’ logs, which record an unimaginable abundance of sea turtles in the Caribbean and whales in the Pacific.” (OnEarth.org)

Tree ring circus

Coastal and riverine habitats are clearly benefiting from the work of archaeologists like Professor Braje, but archaeological research can help identify healthy ecosystems of all types.

It was through extensive tree-ring dating that we were able to understand forest management in Chaco canyon. The tree-ring studies have helped to track the process of deforestation in the canyon, and contrast that with the sustainable selective harvesting of timbers from the Chuska mountains. Discovering ancient lessons like these, and realizing that forest management decisions can impact landscapes for hundreds of years helps educate those who are currently in a position to design those policies for our society.

Archaeobotony, the study of ancient plants and the human impact on them, is also playing a role in restoration. Archeobotony studies can help us learn about things like crop evolution: just how much we’ve changed plants, and ourselves since the onset of agriculture.

The effects of agriculture on the plants we domesticated were:

  • reduction or elimination of natural seed dispersal (so the plant needs human intervention to reproduce)
  • larger fruits and seeds
  • seeds that will sprout under questionable conditions because they’ve become used to the aid of humans for survival (rather than waiting for the season and weather to be right)
  • ripening in sync with other species
  • growing in a more compact space.

Agriculture has also effected yield; an un-domesticated acre provides about 0.1% of edibal plants, but current crop yields are more like 95%. Archeaobotony has helped us to better understand these impacts, and to identify the parts of our agricultural process that have most seriously affected ancient landscapes.

One way archeaobotony helps is by identifying the silent invaders which threaten many ecosystems all over the planet. Non-native species which sneak in on cargo ships or under vehicles are wreaking havoc on native residents that they overwhelm. Archaeologist are able to look at ancient landscapes and help to determine what plants and animals are naturally occurring in the area, and which probably hitched in with humans and could pose a threat.

Interpreting a landscape that has been severely impacted by human use isn’t easy. For example, how far up the Klamath Basin watershed do Coho Salmon historically travel during spawning and their life processes? In order to fully understand how human use and diversion of waterways has impacted the species we must first understand where its native habitat lies. Evidence of regular predation of a species by Native people in the region is a sign that it was well established when humans first arrived on this continent.  On the flip side of that, if no sign of a species exists before the arrival of European immigrants to the Americas, then it’s likely that species isn’t native to the region, but instead arrived as an invader.

Looking down

Aerial survey of ancient river passages also help enable us to discover the “nature” of a river. What is the river’s regular flood cycle? How often has the river historically changed courses? This is important when it comes to rebuilding estuaries and riverine systems.

We have to gain a deeper understanding of the river’s natural behavior in order to comprehend how to keep it healthy. By identifying ancient riverbeds that are now dried up, through aerial surveys and the location of site plots along rivers that no longer exist. we can gain insight into managing today’s rivers as we build for the future.

Dead men do tell tales

We can also study the behavior of people from the parts they left behind.

Bone isotope and density samples let us know if someone was leading a healthy lifestyle. Studying the teeth of ancient people can also be helpful. It’s through bone studies that folks like Jared Diamond have been able to prove that the conversion to an agriculturally-based diet was often not as advantageous as most people had traditionally thought for the majority of the population.

Scientists can demonstrate this by tracking disease, examining average heights, showing that deficient nutrition lead to poor bone development and in some regions, like the Azapa Valley in Chile, an agriculturally dependent diet lead to sugar-induced tooth decay.

It’s clear that effective environmentalism is the offspring of great scientific research, and archaeology has a major role to play.

The next time you think about archaeologists, don’t envision some gold-digging Indiana Jones. Think of guys like Todd Braje, the real archaeologists of the world, who are working to protect the valuable resources of today and our childrens’ treasured future!

 

This was The Role of Archaeology in Restoration, an entry in our Restoration Campaign from February 19, 2010. It was filed under Rangeland and Rivers.

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