ANTH 9 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Nilometer, Crop Yield, Paleontology
7 Oct 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Interactions between humans and their surroundings: environmental influences on humans, human impact on the environment. Archaeology is a small part of a much larger interdisciplinary effort to: Predict what will happen in the future: with or without human influence. Humans with their capacity to alter their surroundings, intentionally or otherwise, are just another part of the mix. People have always been interested in environmental conditions for good, practical reasons. Ancient egyptians monitored the nile"s flood to predict crop yield and hence, taxes: nilometer at aswan. Animal remains: usually hard tissue, bones, teeth, antler, shell, fish scales, occasionally soft tissue. Plant remains: usually carbonized material, sometimes uncarbonized material, pollen, phytoliths. Other locations: ice cores, hundreds of thousands of years ago, sediment cores. Species that serve as indicators of past environments: must be reasonably well represented at archaeological and paleontological sites, temperature and moisture tolerances must be known.
