Anthropogenic Environments: The Cultural Modification of Landscapes and Ecological Systems (Conference Proposal)

We live in an environment transformed by millennia of cultural forces. From the first moment when a hunter deliberately burned grassland to provide better grazing for deer, or a forager scattered seeds on a fertile riverbank, human beings became one of the primary shapers of their ecological systems. No inhabited region of the planet can truly be considered "wild " or "natural " in the sense that humans had no part in creating its current landscape. The effects and importance of human impacts on the environment are fiercely debated by biologists, climatologists, and public policy specialists, both within scholarly venues and mainstream media. Archaeologists, however, are uniquely able to define the nature and implications of anthropogenic landscapes. Only we have data of sufficient time depth and geographic breadth to understand and interpret the myriad ways in which human societies have created and changed their local ecological communities. The multiple scales of archaeological research, from regional surveys to micro-morphological studies of site stratigraphy, allow us to explore the full complexity of this topic. Not only does our data speak to the larger questions (Did humans cause wide