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Prehistoric peoples chose farming locations based on environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, which plays a crucial role in crop production. Ancestral Pueblo communities of the central Mesa Verde region became increasingly reliant on maize agriculture for their subsistence needs by AD 900. Prehistoric agriculturalists (e.g., Ancestral Pueblo farmers) were dependent on having sufficient soil moisture for successful plant growth. To better understand the quality of farmland in terms of soil moisture, this study develops a static geospatial soil moisture model, the Soil Moisture Proxy Model, which uses soil and topographic variables to estimate soil moisture potential across a watershed. The model is applied to the semi-arid region of the Goodman watershed in the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado. We evaluate the model by comparing the Goodman watershed output to two other watersheds and to soil moisture sensor values. The simple framework can be used in other regions of the world, where water is also an important limiting factor for farming. The general outcome of this research is an improved understanding of potential farmland and human-environmental relationships across the local landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on human‐environment interactions that informs ecological practices and guides conservation and restoration has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the last few decades. Fueled in part by the debate over defining a start date for the Anthropocene, historical disciplines like archeology, paleontology, geology, and history are playing an important role in understanding long‐term anthropogenic impacts on the planet. Pleistocene overkill, the notion that humans overhunted megafauna near the end of the Pleistocene in the Americas, Australia, and beyond, is used as prime example of the impact that humans can have on the planet. However, the importance of the overkill model for explaining human–environment interactions and anthropogenic impacts appears to differ across disciplines. There is still considerable debate, particularly within archeology, about the extent to which people may have been the cause of these extinctions. To evaluate how different disciplines interpret and use the overkill model, we conducted a citation analysis of selected works of the main proponent of the overkill model, Paul Martin. We examined the ideas and arguments for which Martin's overkill publications were cited and how they differed between archeologists and ecologists. Archeologists cite overkill as one in a combination of causal mechanisms for the extinctions. In contrast, ecologists are more likely to accept that humans caused the extinctions. Aspects of the overkill argument are also treated as established ecological processes. For some ecologists, overkill provides an analog for modern‐day human impacts and supports the argument that humans have "always" been somewhat selfish overconsumers. The Pleistocene rewilding and de‐extinction movements are built upon these perspectives. The use of overkill in ecological publications suggests that despite increasing interdisciplinarity, communication with disciplines outside of ecology is not always reciprocal or even. The overkill model of Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions has had a significant influence on ideas about anthropogenic impacts on the environment. We conducted a citation analysis showing that archaeologists and ecologists differ significantly in how they interpret the model and its supporting data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zooarchaeological freshwater mussel remains provide information about past environments, faunal communities, and human behaviors. However, one challenge of using archaeological assemblages of animal remains is differential preservation such that bones and shells of some taxa are more vulnerable to processes that destroy or remove them from the record over time. Thus, remains of some species of freshwater mussels may be underrepresented in terms of presence/absence data as well as abundance compared to the life or death assemblages. Evaluating the representativeness of assemblages before using such data to answer zooarchaeological and paleozoological research questions is common practice in archaeology, particularly for vertebrate remains. However, little research has focused on evaluating representativeness for molluscan assemblages. In this paper, three processes that potentially influence archaeomalacological data are addressed: mussel life history strategies, shell identifiability, and shell robusticity. Expectations about taxonomic abundances in unionid zooarchaeological assemblages are framed and assessed using two datasets from sites from the Leon River in central Texas. As expected, shell robusticity and identifiability influence zooarchaeological abundance data; differences in life history strategy can be used to interpret past stream environments. The expectations derived in this paper can be used as interpretive tools for understanding factors that influence archaeomalacological taxonomic abundance data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study that presents a paleozoological perspective on the zoogeography of unionid in the upper Trinity River basin in central Texas. The study was undertaken through an analysis of faunal remains in three archaeological sites near the Clear Fork and West Fork of the river dating 2500 and 600 years ago and the use of historical and modern surveys. Results of the study show that at least one species was present during the late Holocene.

Archaeological and paleontological datasets are used in conservation to add time-depth to ecology. In central Texas, several top carnivores including prehistoric Native American hunters have been extirpated or have had their historic ranges restricted, which has resulted in pest-level white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus texana) populations in some areas. Differences in body size of deer between prehistory and modernity are expected, given that a lack of predation likely has increased intraspecific competition for forage among deer, resulting in smaller body size today. In fact, modern deer from settings without harvest pressure are significantly smaller than those from harvested areas and from prehistoric deer. From a natural history perspective, this research highlights potential evolutionary causes and effects of top-predator removal on deer populations and related components of biological communities in central Texas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conservation agenda to re-wild North America may or may not be realistic in terms of political ecology. However, it represents a real conservation recommendation to re-wild North America with the extant megafauna most closely related to those that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. The recommendation is based on the presumption that society bears an ethical responsibility to re-wild because humans caused the extinctions. However, the extent to which Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions were the result of overkill is hotly debated. As a result, the ethical imperative for North American re-wilding should be questioned. It will not be questioned unless members of the conservation community read the extensive archaeological and geological literature concerning the North American Pleistocene extinctions. Overlooking the assumptions underlying this particular recommendation is costly to conservation science and to archaeology because it represents an over-simplified, unwieldy and troubling fusion of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]