Reconstructing a Prairie-Woodland Mosaic on the Northern Great Plains: Risk, Resilience, and Resource Management

Recent geological evidence of high-amplitude, short-term, climatic variability on the northern Plains in the late Holocene implies that significant fluctuations in resource availability may have regularly occurred on the scale of human generations. In this region, evidence of high mobility, low popu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Plains anthropologist 2006-08, Vol.51 (199), p.235-252
Main Authors: Boyd, M., Hamilton, S., Running IV, G.L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
anthropogenic burning
Case studies
Climate change
Drought
Ecology
Excavation and methods
Field method
Field study
Glacial lakes
Glacial plains
historical ecology
hunter-gatherer land use
landscape reconstruction
Landscapes
Methodology and general studies
northern Great Plains
Paleoanthropology
Prairies
Prehistory and protohistory
Resource management
Risk factors
Survey
Vegetation
Wetlands
Woodlands
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Summary:Recent geological evidence of high-amplitude, short-term, climatic variability on the northern Plains in the late Holocene implies that significant fluctuations in resource availability may have regularly occurred on the scale of human generations. In this region, evidence of high mobility, low population density, and storage are generalized responses of hunter-gatherer populations to the effects of environmental variability on resourcepredictability. In order to achieve more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between risk, environment, and land-use for the last few thousand years, we suggest that multidisciplinary reconstruction of detailed landscape histories is necessary. This is so because landscape histories may encode: (1) spatial and temporal variability in habitat diversity (i.e., patchiness); (2) geographical differences in ecosystem resilience and resistance to short-term macro climatic variability; and (3) enhancement of resource predictability or diversity through lnanagement practices such as anthropogenic burning. Modern vegetation surveys, presettlement landcover reconstructions, and recent geomorphic and paleo vegetation data from the Oak Lake Sandhills, Manitoba, Canada, are assembled to illustrate these points.
ISSN:0032-0447
2052-546X
DOI:10.1179/pan.2006.024