Climate Change and Human Responses A Zooarchaeological Perspective

1. Introduction: Why This Volume?
2. The Southern Levant During the Last Glacial and Zooarchaeological Evidence for the Effects of Climate-Forcing on Hominin Population Dynamics
3. Quaternary Mammals, People, and Climate Change: A View from Southern North America
4. Holocene Large Mammal Extinctions in Palawan Island, Philippines
5. Human Response to Climate Change in the Northern Adriatic During the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene
6. Early to Middle Holocene Climatic Change and the Use of Animal Resources by Highland Hunter-Gatherers of the South-Central Andes
7. Climate Change at the Holocene Thermal Maximum and Its Impact on Wild Game Populations in South Scandinavia
8. Oxygen Isotope Seasonality Determinations of Marsh Clam Shells from Prehistoric Shell Middens in Nicaragua
9. Climatic Changes and Hunter-Gatherer Populations: Archaeozoological Trends in Southern Patagonia
10. Evidence of Changing Climate and Subsistence Strategies Among the Nuu-chah-nulth of Canada’s West Coast
11. Biometry and Climate Change in Norse Greenland: The Effect of Climate on the Size and Shape of Domestic Mammals
12. Zooarchaeology in the 21st Century: Comments on the Contributions

This book contributes to the current discussion on climate change by presenting selected studies on the ways in which past human groups responded to climatic and environmental change. In particular, the chapters show how these responses are seen in the animal remains that people left behind in their occupation sites. Many of these bones represent food remains, so the environments in which these animals lived can be identified and human use of those environments can be understood. In the case of climatic change resulting in environmental change, these animal remains can indicate that a change has occurred, in climate, environment and human adaptation, and can also indicate the specific details of those changes.