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Decisions and Consequences: understanding the long-term role of human livelihoods on ecological systems
Abstract:
The identification of feedback-loops between human activities and landscape transformations is vital for understanding the consequences of societal actions on ecological systems. Archaeology provides a means by which to assess these dynamics over long periods of time, which can help reveal mechanisms of change and relationships between human societies and environmental shifts at different scales. On Madagascar, ecological and cultural diversity provide a unique case study to examine the interrelationship between people and environment, decision making and its impacts on socio-environmental conditions, and role that different socioeconomic practices have on long-term ecological conditions. In this talk, I present some of the results of recent and ongoing research that blends archaeology, geospatial science, and paleoecology to investigate human behavioral strategies and their long-term ecological consequences in SW Madagascar. I show how geospatial approaches (e.g., remote sensing, network analysis) can aid archaeological and paleoenvironmental investigations into human-environmental relationships
Bio:
Dylan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted in the Climate School at Columbia University. He is also a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He is trained as an archaeologist and remote sensing scientist specializing in human-environmental interaction. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2022 from Penn State where he investigated the role of settlement choice on human adaptations to climate change over the past millennium in SW Madagascar. Dylan's current research seeks to understand the role that socioeconomic strategies play in long-term ecological change across landscapes, and how different land use systems affect ecological productivity over long periods of time.
