Remote Sensing Reveals Lasting Legacies of Land-Use by Small-Scale Foraging Communities in the Southwestern Indian Ocean
Remote Sensing Reveals Lasting Legacies of Land-Use by Small-Scale Foraging Communities in the Southwestern Indian Ocean
复制标题
DOI：
10.3389/fevo.2021.689399
复制
发表时间：
2021-09-03
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Douglass, Kristina
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Davis, Dylan S.;Douglass, Kristina
对人类景观演化感兴趣的考古学家们卓有成效地采用了生态位构建理论(NCT)，以评估人类与环境相互作用的长期遗产。NCT的应用尤其被用于阐明农业和牧业系统中的共同进化动力学。与此同时，从景观的角度来看，觅食和/或流动性高的小规模社区往往被认为在土地利用方面不如农牧经济密集，从理论和分析上受到的关注较少。在这里，我们通过贡献一种新的遥感方法来解决这一缺陷，以调查与高度流动的觅食群落有着长期共同进化历史的景观上人与环境相互作用的遗产。我们的研究集中在马达加斯加西南部的沿海地区，这是一个近两千年来一直居住着觅食和捕鱼社区的地区。尽管马达加斯加西南部的环境在人类定居后发生了重大的环境变化，包括动物灭绝的浪潮，但人们对人为改变景观的规模、速度和性质知之甚少。这一地区的考古沉积物通常带有过去人类活动的短暂痕迹，并不明显地显示出密集的土地利用和景观修改(如农业改造、纪念性建筑等)的特征。在本文中，我们使用高分辨率卫星图像和植被指数，通过比较考古遗址和没有记载考古材料的地点的植被生产力和地球化学性质，揭示了人类-景观共同进化的遗产。然后，我们使用随机森林(RF)算法和空间统计来量化考古活动的程度，并使用这种分析来联系现代人类环境动态。我们的结果表明，在过去的1000年里，马达加斯加西南部的沿海觅食社区广泛地改变了景观。因此，我们的研究扩展了我们可以评估马达加斯加人类-环境动态的时间和空间尺度，为研究该岛早期人类历史提供了新的机会，当时流动的觅食社区是景观变化的主要驱动力。
Archaeologists interested in the evolution of anthropogenic landscapes have productively adopted Niche Construction Theory (NCT), in order to assess long-term legacies of human-environment interactions. Applications of NCT have especially been used to elucidate co-evolutionary dynamics in agricultural and pastoral systems. Meanwhile, foraging and/or highly mobile small-scale communities, often thought of as less intensive in terms of land-use than agropastoral economies, have received less theoretical and analytical attention from a landscape perspective. Here we address this lacuna by contributing a novel remote sensing approach for investigating legacies of human-environment interaction on landscapes that have a long history of co-evolution with highly mobile foraging communities. Our study is centered on coastal southwest Madagascar, a region inhabited by foraging and fishing communities for close to two millennia. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar's environment following human settlement, including a wave of faunal extinctions, little is known about the scale, pace and nature of anthropogenic landscape modification. Archaeological deposits in this area generally bear ephemeral traces of past human activity and do not exhibit readily visible signatures of intensive land-use and landscape modification (e.g., agricultural modifications, monumental architecture, etc.). In this paper we use high-resolution satellite imagery and vegetative indices to reveal a legacy of human-landscape co-evolution by comparing the characteristics - vegetative productivity and geochemical properties - of archaeological sites to those of locations with no documented archaeological materials. Then, we use a random forest (RF) algorithm and spatial statistics to quantify the extent of archaeological activity and use this analysis to contextualize modern-day human-environment dynamics. Our results demonstrate that coastal foraging communities in southwest Madagascar over the past 1,000 years have extensively altered the landscape. Our study thus expands the temporal and spatial scales at which we can evaluate human-environment dynamics on Madagascar, providing new opportunities to study early periods of the island's human history when mobile foraging communities were the dominant drivers of landscape change.