Variability of El Nino/Southern Oscillation activity at millennial timescales during the Holocene epoch. Anthropogenic burning, agricultural intensification, and landscape transformation in post-Lapita Fiji. yr BP) deposits from Bourewa, southwest Viti Levu Island, Fiji. Evidence for introduced taro (Colocasia esculenta) and lesser yam (Dioscorea esculenta) in Lapita-era (c. in The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania (eds Cochrane, E. in Tropical Fire Ecology: Climate Change, Land Use, and Ecosystem Dynamics (ed. Continental-scale partitioning of fire emissions during the 1997 to 2001 El Niño/La Niña period. Late Quaternary fire regimes of Australasia. Predictors of pre-European deforestation on Pacific islands: a re-analysis using modern multivariate non-parametric statistical methods. Environmental predictors of pre-European deforestation on Pacific islands. The human dimension of biodiversity changes on islands. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Revised edn (Penguin, 2011). This indicates that fire activity and deforestation were a product of the interaction between swidden agriculture and climate rather than land use alone.ĭiamond, J. Post-settlement, charcoal and C 4 grasses increased dramatically, but nearly all major peaks in charcoal and grasses corresponded to increased El Niño activity. Pre-settlement fires generally corresponded to droughts, probably driven by El Niño, often correlating with drought-driven wildfires elsewhere in the region. Regional comparisons with previous studies in Fiji and elsewhere in Remote Oceania settled between 3,200 and 2,900 yr bp reveal a similar pattern of pre- and post-settlement fire activity and landscape change. Fires and pyrogenic patches of grassland predated human settlement by millennia, but the magnitude of fire activity and landscape transformation accelerated with the establishment and expansion of swidden agriculture. We use charcoal and stable carbon isotopes from deep soil cores to reconstruct the dynamics of fire activity and deforestation across the Sigatoka River valley on the leeward (dry) side of Viti Levu, Fiji. Here, human causality of this environmental degradation has been unquestioned and viewed as evidence of the inherent destructive tendencies of human societies in both archaeological and popular discourse. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean (Oceania) experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the past 3,000 yr.
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