Preparing my lecture for the new Scientific Methods in Archaeology course for VU Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam students studying a minor in Geoarchaeology. The focus will be on detecting human activity in the past, to illustrate this I will include Easter Island/Rapa Nui as a case study. We will focus on how palaeoecological evidence can be used to gain insights into past human activity. Whilst putting this together I discovered these nice documentaries looking at humans and their environmental impacts on Easter Island/Rapa Nui which I wanted to share, they show how much effort people would have had to put into altering their landscape:
For further information see also:
Rull, V., Cañellas-Boltà, N., Saez, A., Margalef, O., Bao, R., Pla-Rabes, S., Valero-Garcés, B. & Giralt, S. (2013) Challenging Easter Island’s collapse: The need for interdisciplinary synergies. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 1, DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2013.00003
Hall, S.A. (2010) Early maize pollen from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA. Palynology 34, 125-137. DOI: 10.1080/01916121003675746
Janzen, D.H. (1967) Why mountain passes are higher in the tropics. The American Naturalist 101, 233-249. DOI: 10.1086/282487
Tovar, C., Arnillas, C.A., Cuesta, F. & Buytaert, W. (2013) Diverging responses of tropical Andean biomes under future climate conditions. PLoS ONE 8, e63634. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0063634