ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5443-8353
Current Organisation
University of Sydney
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 08-04-2014
DOI: 10.1017/S0376892914000083
Abstract: Reconstructing the environmental history of protected areas permits an empirically-based assessment of the conservation values ascribed to these sites. Ideally, this long-term view can contribute to evidence-based management policy that is both ecologically ‘realistic’ and pragmatically feasible. Lachlan Nature Reserve, a protected wetland in Centennial Park, Sydney, is claimed to be the final remnant of early and pre-European sw lands that were once extensive in the area, and the site is thus considered to have indigenous cultural and natural conservation significance. This study uses palynological techniques to reconstruct vegetation communities at the Reserve from the late Holocene to the present in order to assess whether these values adequately reflect the history, character and development of the site. The findings indicate that the modern site flora is a modified Melaleuca quinquenervia low forest assemblage formed in response to aggregated anthropogenic disturbance since colonial settlement. This assemblage replaces an Epacris -dominated heath-sw land community that was extirpated in the mid-20th century. These results emphasize the value of long-term studies in contributing to a realistic management policy that explicitly reflects the normative basis of conservation, and values the influence of past land-uses on contemporary protected ecosystems.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.1002/APP5.377
Abstract: Meat consumption and production in Asia have boomed over the last decade to meet growing regional and global demand. Asia now supplies around 40% of the global broiler or meat chicken industry. Dominant policy frameworks such as ‘One Health’ aim to manage the health risks associated with factory livestock farming, which has rightly become a major concern because of regular disease outbreaks. Yet this approach provides a limited basis for addressing broader risks and challenges associated with what we term the Asian ‘broiler complex’. This includes the intertwined networks of feed production, factory farming and meat distribution nodes through which health and environmental risks can accumulate and be lified. By applying this broader lens, we highlight the need to better understand the industry's pressing environmental, animal welfare, social and health challenges to inform more integrated policy approaches.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 24-03-2022
DOI: 10.3389/FEART.2022.680926
Abstract: Land use modelling is increasingly used by archaeologists and palaeoecologists seeking to quantify and compare the changing influence of humans on the environment. In Southeast Asia, the intensification of rice agriculture and the arrival of European colonizers have both been seen as major catalysts for deforestation, soil erosion, and bio ersity change. Here we consider the Tuwali-Ifugao people of the Cordillera Central (Luzon, Philippines), who resisted Spanish colonial subjugation from the 16th to the mid-nineteenth century, in part through the development of a world-renowned system of intensive wet-rice terrace agriculture. To quantify changes in how the Tuwali-Ifugao used their environment, we model land use in Old Kiyyangan Village, a long-inhabited settlement, at two timepoints: circa 1570 CE, prior to the Spanish arrival in Luzon, and circa 1800 CE, before the village was sacked by Spanish military expeditions. Our model demonstrates that between 1570 and 1800 the adoption of rice as a staple and the corresponding expansion in terrace agriculture, along with a general ersification of diet and land use, enabled the village’s population to double without increasing total land use area. Further, this major intensification led to the solidification of social hierarchies and occurred without a proportional increase in deforestation.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2020
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 06-12-2021
DOI: 10.3389/FEART.2021.787669
Abstract: Climate variability and hominin evolution are inextricably linked. Yet, hypotheses examining the impact of large-scale climate shifts on hominin landscape ecology are often constrained by proxy data coming from off-site lake and ocean cores and temporal offsets between paleoenvironmental and archaeological records. Additionally, landscape response data (most commonly, records of vegetation change), are often used as a climate proxy. This is problematic as it assumes that vegetation change signifies global or regional climate shifts without accounting for the known non-linear behavior of ecological systems and the often-significant spatial heterogeneity in habitat structure and response. The exploitation of erse, rapidly changing habitats by Homo by at least two million years ago highlights that the ability to adapt to landscapes in flux had emerged by the time of our genus’ African origin. To understand ecosystem response to climate variability, and hominin adaptations to environmental complexity and ecological ersity, we need cross-disciplinary datasets in direct association with stratified archaeological and fossil assemblages at a variety of temporal and spatial scales. In this article, we propose a microhabitat variability framework for understanding Homo ’s adaptability to fluctuating climates, environments, and resource bases. We argue that the exploitation of microhabitats, or unique ecologically and geographically defined areas within larger habitats and ecoregions, was a key skill that allowed Homo to adapt to multiple climates zones and ecoregions within and beyond Africa throughout the Pleistocene.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-02-2023
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-07-2023
DOI: 10.1002/JQS.3555
Abstract: In comparison to temperate and arid regions, environmental responses to the Last Glacial Maximum and the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene boundary remain poorly known for many parts of the tropics, making it challenging to unravel human–landscape interactions across this timeframe. This is particularly the case in insular Near Oceania, where sea‐level fluctuations and potential changes in forest cover may have had major impacts on hunter–gatherer populations. Here, we apply stable carbon and oxygen isotope analyses to small‐mammal teeth from four Pleistocene–Holocene (spanning from 29 000 years ago to the late Holocene) sequences in the Bismarck Archipelago to reconstruct changes in environments directly exploited by human populations in this part of the world. Our results show a subtle response of tropical habitats in Near Oceania to relatively arid conditions during the late‐glacial period, something that has also been observed at sites in South and Southeast Asia, followed by a Terminal Pleistocene–Holocene expansion of tropical forest cover. Nevertheless, site‐based variability in environmental responses across this period highlight the need for more multidisciplinary studies of human occupation sequences in a region that is becoming increasingly central to exploring human adaptations, environmental modifications and social network development over the past 20 000 years.
Publisher: Unpublished
Date: 2013
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2019
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 10-10-2018
Publisher: Past Global Changes (PAGES)
Date: 11-2018
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 23-10-2023
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 07-03-2022
Abstract: Oceania is a key region for studying human dispersals, adaptations and interactions with other hominin populations. Although archaeological evidence now reveals occupation of the region by approximately 65–45 000 years ago, its human fossil record, which has the best potential to provide direct insights into ecological adaptations and population relationships, has remained much more elusive. Here, we apply radiocarbon dating and stable isotope approaches to the earliest human remains so far excavated on the islands of Near and Remote Oceania to explore the chronology and diets of the first preserved human in iduals to step across these Pacific frontiers. We demonstrate that the oldest human (or indeed hominin) fossil outside of the mainland New Guinea-Aru area dates to approximately 11 800 years ago. Furthermore, although these early sea-faring populations have been associated with a specialized coastal adaptation, we show that Late Pleistocene–Holocene humans living on islands in the Bismarck Archipelago and in Vanuatu display a persistent reliance on interior tropical forest resources. We argue that local tropical habitats, rather than purely coasts or, later, arriving domesticates, should be emphasized in discussions of human diets and cultural practices from the onset of our species' arrival in this part of the world. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 27-09-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-12-2022
DOI: 10.1002/GEA.21950
Abstract: Archaeologists frequently invoke climate change as a driving cause for ancient expansions of human populations, but geomorphic changes can also play an important role in opening or closing routes of migration. In China, archaeological evidence demonstrates that valleys in the Jialing River's watershed were important routes for the movement of Neolithic populations from the catchments of the Yellow River to the Yangtze River. Here, we examine how fluvial geomorphological regime shifts may have also influenced the migration pathways and adaptive strategies of Neolithic people into the Sichuan Basin by using a combination of sedimentological and palynological analysis at Luojiaba, an archaeological site located on one of the eastern tributaries of the Jialing River. The results show that people settled on seasonally stable landforms, including the Zhonghe River floodplain at Luojiaba (5300–4800 cal. B.P.). They carried out fishing and hunting activities on the front edge of the floodplain close to the river channel and built dwelling features on the higher ground at the back edge of the floodplain, which was not affected by seasonal floods. We hypothesize that during the Holocene Climatic Optimum before 5500 cal. B.P., high water levels as well as severe surface erosion caused by a strong East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) blocked pathways into the upper reaches of the Jialing River watershed. Only after a series of cold, dry climate events driven by a decrease in EASM intensity ca. 5500–5000 cal. B.P. did water levels recede significantly. This allowed alluvial aggradation to occur, which created floodplains and terraces along the valley that may have opened a new route for the migration into the Sichuan Basin. Our results reveal the human–environment dynamics surrounding Luojiaba in the uplands of southwestern China and highlight the impact of coupled climatic‐geomorphic regime shifts on human settlement and subsistence strategies, across both space and time.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-06-2021
DOI: 10.1038/S41559-021-01474-4
Abstract: It has been suggested that Iberian arrival in the Americas in 1492 and subsequent dramatic depopulation led to forest regrowth that had global impacts on atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and surface temperatures. Despite tropical forests representing the most important terrestrial carbon stock globally, systematic examination of historical afforestation in these habitats in the Neotropics is lacking. Additionally, there has been no assessment of similar depopulation–afforestation dynamics in other parts of the global tropics that were incorporated into the Spanish Empire. Here, we compile and semi-quantitatively analyse pollen records from the regions claimed by the Spanish in the Atlantic and Pacific to provide pan-tropical insights into European colonial impacts on forest dynamics. Our results suggest that periods of afforestation over the past millennium varied across space and time and depended on social, economic and biogeographic contexts. We argue that this reveals the unequal and ergent origins of the Anthropocene as a socio-political and biophysical process, highlighting the need for higher-resolution, targeted analyses to fully elucidate pre-colonial and colonial era human–tropical landscape interactions.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2022
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2019
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 27-09-2021
Abstract: The environmental crises currently gripping the Earth have been codified in a new proposed geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This epoch, according to the Anthropocene Working Group, began in the mid-20th century and reflects the “great acceleration” that began with industrialization in Europe [J. Zalasiewicz et al., Anthropocene 19, 55–60 (2017)]. Ironically, European ideals of protecting a pristine “wilderness,” free from the damaging role of humans, is still often heralded as the antidote to this human-induced crisis [J. E. M. Watson et al., Nature , 563, 27–30 (2018)]. Despite decades of critical engagement by Indigenous and non-Indigenous observers, large international nongovernmental organizations, philanthropists, global institutions, and nation-states continue to uphold the notion of pristine landscapes as wilderness in conservation ideals and practices. In doing so, dominant global conservation policy and public perceptions still fail to recognize that Indigenous and local peoples have long valued, used, and shaped “high-value” bio erse landscapes. Moreover, the exclusion of people from many of these places under the guise of wilderness protection has degraded their ecological condition and is hastening the demise of a number of highly valued systems. Rather than denying Indigenous and local peoples’ agency, access rights, and knowledge in conserving their territories, we draw upon a series of case studies to argue that wilderness is an inappropriate and dehumanizing construct, and that Indigenous and community conservation areas must be legally recognized and supported to enable socially just, empowering, and sustainable conservation across scale.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2020
Location: Germany
No related grants have been discovered for Rebecca Hamilton.