The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes?

I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and civilization grow fuzzier by the day. The latest example is a new, intriguing study on pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon, published last week in PNAS.

This is the kind of stuff that makes my geeky heart flutter: interdisciplinary research on how ancient farmers engineered their environment in a part of the world that most people today consider primordial nature. Additionally, these findings hold important contemporary ecological lessons, as the study’s abstract explains:

The profound alteration of ecosystem functioning in these landscapes coconstructed by humans and nature has important implications for understanding Amazonian history and biodiversity. Furthermore, these landscapes show how sustainability of food-production systems can be enhanced by engineering into them fallows that maintain ecosystem services and biodiversity. Like anthropogenic dark earths in forested Amazonia, these self-organizing ecosystems illustrate the ecological complexity of the legacy of pre-Columbian land use.

In a nice write-up of the study, New Scientist interviews Doyle McKey, the lead researcher, who says:

Human actions cannot always be characterised as bad for biodiversity. Some might be good.

That’s one of those inconvenient truths that purists who subscribe to the human/nature dualism don’t like to hear. But science has come a long way since the publication of George Perkin Marsh’s seminal text.  The increasing collaboration between archaeologists and ecologists is revealing an ancient world that discomfits doctrinaire environmentalists. (In the American Southwest, I’ve written about one such collaboration here.)

Moreover, as the New Scientist article puts it:

The new study is bound to further fuel the debate over whether most of the Amazon rainforest and the associated savannahs are pristine ecosystem.   “To my mind, the debate has been too black-and-white,” says McKey. “Nature and culture are interacting to produce interesting things, and maybe that is the way this debate should go.”

Seems like good advice to me.

Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book:

Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of discontinuity and cultural extinction. Almost universally written from a European perspective, the mythologies of conquest have helped render Native Americans invisible.

Part of what’s bugging Wilcox is also the focus of a new volume of essays (by a number of scholars, including Wilcox), that challenges the research behind Jared Diamond’s popular and influential tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It so happens that just yesterday, Rex over at Savage Minds covered this renewed debate in a detailed post.

Not having read either of the newer books, it’s impossible for me to offer any informed comment on them. But the Stanford piece quotes some provocative Wilcox statements, such as this one at the end:

I may be critical of archaeology, but what I am saying is that it makes sense to do work that is responsive and includes the opinions of indigenous populations. The more that archeologists and Native communities work together, the better things get. I really want this field to do well, and I believe it can be much better. It has to because stories of the past matter.

On this, he’s likely to get little argument from southwestern archaeologists, as many have become increasingly receptive to Native American concerns and oral history. But there’s something about that last sentence–because stories of the past matter–that might set off alarm bells in some quarters. Because, in fact, there are points where science and tribal stories of the past collide.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wilcox and his colleagues reconcile the tension between science and oral tradition. As my recent piece on the contested Navajo history in the Southwest suggests, science can be trumped by the politics of this newfound, well-intentioned sensitivity.

A story I’ve been writing about and following closely since last summer has taken another odd and tragic turn. Here’s a can of worms that’s bound to be pried open:

Ted Gardiner, who had many off-the-record and deep background conversations with The Salt Lake Tribune during the past eight months, insisted he had come to the federal agents on his own to try to stop what he saw as immoral trafficking.

Gardiner was the sole source in the biggest sting operation against pothunters in the Southwest. He killed himself on Monday. Will those “conversations” see the light of day?

Last year, evidence from a DNA test was thought to have solved one of Utah’s oldest cold cases: the 1934 disappearance of Everett Ruess.  National Geographic Adventure published a big, splashy exclusive on the 75-year old mystery. But some observers, most notably Kevin Jones, Utah’s state archaeologist, had reason to question the findings in the story, including the genetic analysis that seemed to confirm the identity of the discovered bones.

In this Salt Lake Tribune story last summer, Jones continued to air his doubts:

A lot of people threw aside their skepticism with the announcement of the DNA tests. They don’t realize that DNA is just another line of evidence, and can yield mistakes as well.

That infuriated the scientists at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, who did the DNA analysis. One of them, Dennis Van Gerven shot back:

Genetic evidence is not just another kind of evidence. This is the kind of evidence that puts people on death row and takes people off death row.

That quote is going to haunt Van Gerven for some time.

Kevin Jones turned out to be right. Here’s my short profile of him in the current issue of High Country News.

The exhibits in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, like many archaeology exhibits, depicts Indians wearing only loincloths. Yet, as my favorite archaeology blogger points out,  there is ample historical and archaeological evidence that ancient Puebloans (more popularly known as the Anasazi) wore clothes. Imagine that!

He rightly concludes that this false representation

has more to do with the preconceptions of the people who made the dioramas than with what people at Chaco and elsewhere actually wore.

I’ve been following (and writing about) the battle over Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon since 2004. The place is so loaded with incredible rock art and other archaeological riches that it would be a national park if the landscape wasn’t a checkerboard of federal, state, county and private owners.

Then there’s the huge natural gas reserves that are the center of a long-running dispute between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bill Barrett Corporation, a Denver-based oil & gas company, and a coalition of preservationists.  Well, earlier this week, all the parties reached a compromise agreement that allows the gas drilling to go forward with more stringent safeguards. Lots of people have been publicly crowing about this deal, but behind the scenes, there’s much grumbling and even outright accusations that the preservationists got rolled by the BLM and the gas company.

The mainstream press mostly centered on all the backslapping. No reporters have taken a critical look at the details of the agreement. So I read the document myself and then started making calls earlier this week. My previous reporting on Nine Mile Canyon has revealed some shady behavior on the part of BLM, so I was curious to learn if this new accord represented a true depature from Business as Usual. What I found out is that most of the preservationists who signed the accord did so pretty much holding their noses. Anyway, for more perspective, read the story I just wrote for Archaeology Magazine, which takes a hard look at the perceived failings of this highly vaunted deal.

I recently wrote two stories for Archaeology magazine about the clash of history, science, and culture in the American Southwest. The main piece in the Nov/Dec issue juxtaposes Navajo claims to famous prehistoric sites, such as Chaco Canyon, with new archaeological data. This latest material evidence reinforces the strong scientific consensus that the Navajo didn’t arrive in the Southwest until sometime in the 1500s.

The accompanying web-only piece illustrates how Navajo oral history deeply shapes the views and beliefs of Taft Blackhorse, a Navajo archaeologist who I spent time with while reporting on these stories. I will say that I grew quite fond of Taft and his colleague, John Stein. They were generous hosts and there’s a part of me rooting for them to continue their maverick ways and quixotic quest. That said, I have no doubt that many archaeologists will be shaking their heads in disbelief at some of the statements they make.

Combined, the two stories reveal an interesting dilemma for archaeologists who strive to reconcile data-driven science with information gleaned from a culture’s oral tradition.

I’ll have more to say on all this shortly, as I suspect others will offer their own commentary, some who I know have already read the print story. I look forward to a spirited exchange.

One final thought: while writing these stories, I was reminded of something I once read in an essay by geographer D.W. Meinig, in this classic book:

Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes, but what lies in our heads.

This story in Nature News about societal collapse in ancient Peru is worth noting, especially for this quote by one of the main researchers:

Dramatic climactic events are always used to explain culture change in the Andes. But this is not satisfying based on what we know about human culture. It paints a picture of culture sitting there, not changing, hit by events over which they have no control. But Native Americans did not always live in harmony with their environment.

That last line provided some fodder for an interesting exchange in the comments thread of the story. I really wish Savage Minds would take up this meme some day. By happenstance, the death of this giant in anthropology is relevant to a wider discussion, which Rex duly notes over at Savage Minds:

First, Lévi-Strauss taught us that culture is a force in its own right.

The question many scholars struggle with is how much of a “force” culture plays in a society’s own demise–be it the Anasazi, the Angkor, or even in the widely cited case of a certain island people.

This article by Roger Webster, a South African historian, is intriguing on several levels. I was drawn in by this opening:

One of the many aspects of history and archaeology that fascinates me is that, in many respects, archaeology becomes the verifier, or the destroyer, of history.

Be sure to read it all the way through to the haunting poem about drought that closes the piece.

I have an upcoming story in the Nov/Dec issue of Archaeology magazine that will perhaps generate some controversy among Southwestern archaeologists. (It’s called “Who were the Anasazi?”)  The piece explores Navajo claims to ancient Puebloan sites in Chaco Canyon and other famous prehistoric ruins in the Four Corners region. My story also discusses a wealth of new Navajo archaeological sites discovered outside Farmington, New Mexico in the last 15 years (courtesy of a big natural gas project).

As some people have already mentioned to me, the Nov/Dec print issue of Archaeology is already on newstands and arriving in subscriber mailboxes. But it won’t be online until the end of this month or on Dec 1. Thus, until I can actually link to the story, I’m going to hold off on posting about it. But I will have much to say about it then. So too, I understand, will several science journalists and archaeology bloggers be writing about it. I’m glad to hear that, because although the story focuses on the Navajo, it speaks to a number of larger issues smoldering in SW archaological circles.