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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reconstructing Late Holocene Fire, Agriculture, And Climate From Sediment Records In Costa Rica And The Dominican Republic, Erik Nicholas Johanson
Reconstructing Late Holocene Fire, Agriculture, And Climate From Sediment Records In Costa Rica And The Dominican Republic, Erik Nicholas Johanson
Doctoral Dissertations
We use multiple proxies from sediment cores to identify periods of climate stress during the late Holocene across the circum-Caribbean region and to determine how fire activity and signals of Pre-Columbian agriculture coincide with these arid periods. We examine evidence of aridity from stable carbon isotope ratios and shifts in elemental composition, along with pollen and microscopic charcoal, at Bao Bog in the highlands of Hispaniola. We infer two major periods of aridity (3600–2300 and 1040–850 cal yr BP), with the later period associated with the late phase of the Terminal Classic Drought. A third, less marked interval of aridity …
Spatial Variation In Organic Carbon And Stable Isotope Composition Of Lake Sediments At Laguna Zoncho, Costa Rica, Zachary P Taylor
Spatial Variation In Organic Carbon And Stable Isotope Composition Of Lake Sediments At Laguna Zoncho, Costa Rica, Zachary P Taylor
Doctoral Dissertations
Lake sediments are valuable paleoenvironmental archives that provide information on past climate and land-use change. Most lake sediment studies rely on a single core, usually recovered from the center of a lake, and do not consider spatial variability in the lake basin. My dissertation presents a spatially-explicit record of prehistoric agriculture from Laguna Zoncho, Costa Rica and evaluates spatial variability in lake sediment proxies based on a network of five sediment cores. Results extend earlier proxy analyses of a single core collected near the center of the lake, which documented prehistoric agriculture and forest clearance from 3000 to about 500 …