Learning from past societies.
At first glance, it might seem that archaeology and ecology don't have much in common.
One unearths the ancient human past; the other studies the interactions of living organisms. But taking the long view in understanding humans' influence on ecosystems and vice versa can provide new insights in both fields, according to a new study by researchers from the Santa Fe Institute, Utah State University, and the University of Washington.
Employing ecological tools such as food web modeling can help archaeologists create a fuller picture of the ways people interacted with their
environment in the distant past. At the same time, as archaeologists reconstruct the human-environment relationship in ancient communities, those insights can better inform ecologists' ideas of how the past has shaped the present, and humanity's place in today's
ecosystems, says archaeologist Stefani Crabtree of SFI and Utah State University, the lead author of the study published April 30 in the journal
Antiquity.
"Because we have this record of people going out into the environment and bringing things back home, and then those things being deposited in middens, or trash heaps, we actually have a really good record of how people were interacting with the environment," she says. "They did all kinds of things to modify their environment. And so we can look back in the
archaeological record, and it can help calibrate our understanding of our ecosystems today."
Ancient communities may seem far removed from us, but they have much to teach us, she adds. ...
https://phys.org/news/2021-05-ancient-food-webs-sustainable-futures.html