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Ecosystem Engineering, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and Sea Level Changes Over 8000 Years of Human History in the Eastern Caribbean

January 30, 2018, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location Center for Environmental and Life Sciences - 120
Posted InCollege of Science and Mathematics

About Dr. Peter Siegel

Peter Siegel is professor and chair of anthropology at MSU. He is a New World archaeologist, specializing in the cultures and landscapes of eastern North America, the Caribbean, and lowland South America. For the past ten years he has been directing an interdisciplinary project in Caribbean island historical ecology.

About the Seminar

Upon first arrival of humans to new places anthropogenic disturbances to landscapes commence. Later groups of different people or descendants of the original colonists will make yet additional modifications and so on through time, so that by today the landscape contains a cumulative record of anthropogenic history. We combined the interpretive frameworks of landscape and historical ecology to investigate the anthropogenic trajectories across nine islands of the southern and eastern Caribbean. Microfossils from a series of environmental cores reveal the shifting and cumulative humanization of landscapes from c. 8000 cal yr BP through early European colonial occupations in this region.