Archeology, deep history, and the human transformation of island ecosystems

Abstract

Island ecosystems and peoples face uncertain futures in the wake of predicted climate change, sea level rise, and habitat alteration in the decades and centuries to come. Archeological and paleoecological records provide important context for understanding modern environmental and sociopolitical developments on islands. We review and analyze human interactions with island ecosystems in Polynesia, the Caribbean, and California during the last several millennia. Our analysis demonstrates that human impacts on island ecosystems and cases of highly managed anthropogenic landscapes extend deep in the past, often beginning at initial settlement. There are important issues of scale and island physical characteristics, however, that make human ecodynamics on islands variable through space and time. These data demonstrate that current environmental problems have their roots in deeper time and suggest that the Anthropocene likely began by the onset of the Holocene, if not earlier.