Plants and Landscapes Across Time

The Venango Path was a Native American pathway in western Pennsylvania that ran from the Forks of the Ohio north to the village of Venango at the mouth of French Creek, thence through the French Creek Valley to Presque Isle near Lake Erie. The Venango Path was an important north-south “landscape of movement” for Native Americans and Europeans alike, facilitating trade, migration and settlement, and military activities.  Using journals and maps of surveyors and military expeditions from the 18^th century, I examined evidence for cultural landscapes along the Venango Path, influenced by Native American land use. Oak barrens, largely produced by burning, were frequently noted by travelers along the southern Venango Path. In the glaciated valley of French Creek along the northern Venango Path, the landscapes were rich and varied, including savannas, prairies and diverse forests, suggesting a range of Native American land use practices - burning and perhaps agroforestry.

The purpose of this research is to develop and deepen understanding about how the Indigenous Agriculture Knowledge or Traditional Knowledge in a Fijian way of life influences agriculture farming, with a particular focus on traditional ecological knowledge and its relevance in kumala farming in Ra province in Fiji. This adaptation can be achieved by using the Fijian Vanua Research Framework that will enable a way forward. In this research, I adapt Berke’s knowledge-practice-belief complex (2008) of TEK to discuss TEK’s role in Kumala Agricultural farming in the traditional Fijian context under four components, values and beliefs, practices, skills, and knowledge. Indigenous knowledge exists in various areas of the Fijian way of life such as health, spiritual beliefs, and environmental survival. The indigenous Fijians TEK on seasons is captured in the traditional calendar outlining “sources of food available at different times”.

Keywords: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Food Security, Climate Smart Agriculture, Kumala, and Vanua Research Framework

Phytolith analysis is increasingly used to address a range of archaeological research questions. While greater transparency and standardized identifications have been developed, a lack of standardized processing protocols persists due to the varied nature of the sediments and soils from which phytoliths are sampled. In well preserved contexts, phytoliths might be easily extracted with minimal alterations to the sediments and soils in question. In silty clay-rich sediments or soils, the increased use of dangerous chemicals, deflocculation agents, sonication, etc., may be necessary to separate phytoliths from the matrix. Here, we present additional details and suggestions for the sonication method(s) outlined by Lombardo and colleagues and urge phytolith researchers to consider, justify, and clearly report their processing protocols. We argue that clarifying processing protocols will lead to greater transparency in laboratory methods, more reliable production of clearer microscopy slides and, in turn, more confident morphological identifications and phytolith densities

The places people live and spend time are steeped in history and have direct connections to cultural practices, ritual, daily life, and environmental interactions. Cultural Keystone Places (CKP) are important landscapes that are imbued with people’s identity, history, and ecology. We identify Humqaq or Point Conception, California as a Chumash CKP. Ethnohistoric accounts and contemporary Chumash community members have long demonstrated the importance of Point Conception in Chumash worldview and identity. Recent archaeological survey of the coastline surrounding Humqaq highlights these connections, identifying over 50 archaeological sites and at least 9000 years of occupation. Point Conception is also an area of high biological diversity, an important marine and terrestrial biogeographical boundary, and an area of conservation priority. We discuss the results of our archaeological research and ongoing collaborations between archaeologists, The Nature Conservancy, and Chumash community members for understanding the past, present, and future of Humqaq.

We now recognize that the ecology of many of the world’s forests reflects millennia of indigenous hunting, gathering and agriculture. Much of the research supporting this assertion has been conducted under the frameworks of historical and political ecology in regions like the Amazon basin, where legacy forests survive as socio-ecological palimpsests. Drawing from research on Archaic hunter-gatherers in the Lower Mississippi Valley of the United States, I argue that these frameworks fall short when applied to the longue durée of ecological systems erased by European colonialism and modern development. To compensate for the loss of cultural information encoded in legacy ecologies, I advocate greater articulation with research on hunter-gatherer societies and their variable social relations of production. In the archaeological record of the Lower Mississippi Valley Archaic, earthworks and paleoethnobotanical remains provide proxies for these relationships, permitting a study of regional historical ecology focused on social organization.

This talk reviews a rich lexicon of littoral seascape feature terms recorded in seven Gwatle fishing villages in the Aru Islands, Indonesia. We provide context and ethnographic details of Gwatle marine resource harvesting, notably pearl oyster diving. Gwatle littoral sea tenure zones are assessed as designates for Cultural Keystone Places, a metaphorical term and concept for sites of long-intense interactions between a community and their biophysical environment. Such recognition supports cultural diversity, conservation ecology, and tenure. We focus on Gwatle people’s interactive activities with named seascape features. This novel assessment of littoral marine seas as Cultural Keystone Places contributes to the robustness of the concept and to the ethnophysiography of seascape environments.