Explore the vast range of titles available.

Long-term, large-scale perspectives are necessary for understanding climate variability and its effects on ecosystems and cultures. Tree ring records of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and Little Ice Age (LIA) have documented major hydroclimatic variability during the last millennium in the American West, but fewer continuous, high-resolution hydroclimate records of the MCA-LIA period are available for eastern North America, particularly during the transition from the MCA to the LIA (ca. A.D. 1250–1400). Diatoms (micro-algae with silica cell walls) in sediment cores from three Adirondack (NY, USA) lakes and a hiatus in a wetland peat deposit in the Adirondack uplands provide novel insights into the late Holocene hydroclimate history of the Northeast. These records demonstrate that two of the region’s most extreme decadal-scale droughts of the last millennium occurred ca. A.D. 1260–1330 and ca. A.D. 1360–1390 during a dry-wet-dry (DWD) oscillation in the Adirondacks that contributed to forest fires and desiccation of wetlands in New York and Maine. The bimodal drying was probably related to more extreme droughts farther west and coincided with major events in Iroquoian and Abenaki cultural history. Although the causes of the DWD oscillation in the Adirondacks remain uncertain, changing sea-surface temperatures and solar variability are likely to have played a role.

People regularly use plants for a wide range of utilitarian, spiritual, pharmacological, and dietary purposes throughout the world. Scholarly understanding of the nature of these uses in prehistory is particularly limited by the poor preservation of plant resources in the archaeological record. In the last two decades, researchers in the South Pacific and in Central and South America have developed microscopic starch grain analysis, a technique for overcoming the limitations of poorly preserved plant material.   In Acorns and Bitter Roots , Timothy C. Messner establishes starch grain analysis in the temperate climates of eastern North America using the Delaware River Watershed as a case study for furthering scholarly understanding of the relationship between native people and their biophysical environment in the Woodland Period. Messner’s analysis is based on extensive reviews of the literature on early historic and prehistoric native plant use and the collation of all available archaeobotanical data, a review of which also guided the author in selecting contemporary botanical specimens to identify and in interpreting starch residues recovered from ancient plant-processing technologies. The evidence presented here sheds light on many local ecological and cultural developments as ancient people shifted their subsistence focus from estuarine to riverine settings. These archaeobotanical datasets, Messner argues, illuminate both the conscious and unintentional translocal movement of ideas and ecologies throughout the Eastern Woodlands.

Today, people in the U.S. commonly engage in mutual relationships with white-tailed deer (WTD) in manners consistent with those that ultimately resulted in the domestication of animals in the past. Using a wide range of media depicting perspectives of sport hunters, biologists, ecologists, and game managers this paper explores: 1) the influence of anthropogenic environments on WTD behavior, 2) 'game' management and the ability to create valued demographics, and 3) the selection for increased antler size in farmed WTD. This study demonstrates that in order to gain a more accurate understanding of domestication, analyses should focus on the evolution of mutualisms between people and animals. Insights gleamed from this analysis also contribute toward our archaeological understanding of prehistoric animal domestication.

Throughout the world people utilize plants for a wide range of utilitarian, pharmacological, spiritual and dietary purposes. Unfortunately, our understanding of the nature of these practices in prehistory is limited by the poor preservation of plant resources in the archaeological record. In the last two decades, researchers in the South Pacific and Central/South America have developed a technique for overcoming this limitation. Starch grain analysis is a methodology which examines microscopic starch residues recovered from archaeological contexts. By analyzing these residues, which are often diagnostic of the plant species that produced them, these scholars have revolutionized archaeological understandings of prehistoric plant use in these regions. My dissertation establishes this archaeobotanical methodology in the temperate climates of eastern North America using the Delaware River Watershed (DRW) as a case study for illustrating its efficacy. In order to accomplish this: (1) I conducted an in-depth survey of the ethnobotanical and ethnohistoric literature through which I determined the range of plant types targeted by historic Native peoples; (2) I compiled and analyzed referenced botanical specimens for use within a starch grain comparative collection; and (3) I conducted starch grain analysis on a sample of tools from sites distributed throughout the DRW. By examining over 150 of the most widely noted economic plants depicted within this literature review, I found that many produce morphologically distinct starch grains. In addition, my research examines the ethnohistoric accounts of plant processing strategies, as these activities often result in the deposition of starch residues on tool surfaces. Through analogy, this provides insight into prehistoric plant utilization and processing techniques. Using the available macrobotanical data and the starch grain comparative collection, I then examine prehistoric plant utilization during the Woodland Period (1200 BC to AD 1600) in the DRW. Through the identification of archaeological starch residues, this dissertation provides evidence of prehistoric subsistence practices formerly unrecognized in the archaeobotanical record. From this study, I conclude that aspects of Native American plant based knowledge systems witnessed by early Europeans were rooted in the prehistoric past.