Charismatic megafauna, regional identity, and invasive species: what role does environmental archaeology play in contemporary conservation efforts?

ABSTRACT

The popular prioritization of climate change issues over biodiversity loss in environmental archaeology and palaeoecology has been argued to be in part due to agenda-setting created by the ripple effects of widespread media coverage of climatic change. In this paper, we argue that direct scientific evidence for past human landscapes can act as a powerful tool in modern conservation efforts to combat species loss when taking regional identities, historical ecology, and modern political ecologies into account. How to rank and prioritize conservation efforts in the Anthropocene and best make use of archaeological data are lingering questions within Anthropocene anthropology and archaeological science. By engaging with notions of deep-time enchantment and identity, archaeology can aid conservation biology with revealing the religio-philosophical dimensions that exist between humans and other species, in particular charismatic megafauna that lend themselves to high engagement at a local or regional level.

KEYWORDS:

• Invasive species
• charismatic megafauna
• palaeoecology
• conservation biology
• Anthropocene

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy for supporting and encouraging interdisciplinary environmental studies. Meryl Shriver-Rice would like to thank the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project’s environmental team, the Potentino Exploration Project’s focus on biodiversity and heritage in the Seggiano valley, the helpful discussion on her paper entitled ‘The challenges of environmental studies in pre-Roman first millennium BCE central Italy: a methodological case study’ at the 2017 Archaeological Institute of America conference in Toronto, and the American Academy of Rome for a 2016 fellowship that supported this research. M. Jesse Schneider wishes to thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami and the team members of the Matecumbe Chiefdom Project for their support and renewed scholarship into the historical ecology and zooarchaeology of South Florida. Christine Joelle Pardo would like to thank the Department of Biology at the University of Miami and the Organization for Tropical Studies for fellowship and educational support for projects on the ecological and social dimensions of plant invasions into tropical forests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).