Aquatic environments, including rivers, wetlands, intertidal zones, and estuaries, have attracted humans for millennia. With high biodiversity and biomass, these ecosystems are key locales in migration, trade networks, and sites of landscape transformation. This deep history of human use has resulted in strong social and spiritual connections with these land- and waterscapes, with people’s identities and the ecosystems in which they live being tightly woven together.

Applied Historical Ecology (AHE), an interdisciplinary framework drawing together complementary lines of archaeological, ecological and ethnobiological evidence, has emerged as an increasingly powerful standpoint to consider scientific methods, historical data and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Such efforts include partnerships between place-based communities and aquatic scientists applying archaeological data and methods. Combining this suite of information has the potential to illuminate the scale and importance of long-term human-environment relationships while also providing key data that can help to shape future ecosystem and watershed management and conservation.

Discussions around long-term human-environment relationships within aquatic ecosystems have often focused on human impacts. However, it should be considered more a process of interaction and engagement to ensure continuity of ecosystems. There is an under-recognition of the extended and underappreciated legacy of human created aquatic habitats. How do we consider contemporary conservation and management of aquatic ecosystems, if not also engaging with archaeological evidence, considering the former management systems that enabled historic and contemporary abundances and ecological processes? With this in mind, what is the renewed potential of restoration initiatives that partner with communities to ensure continuity, and what are the implications for traditional harvesting and tenure systems, cultural revitalization, and ethnobiological diversity?

Applied Historical Ecology requires researchers to mobilize the relevance of archaeological information to reveal the longer histories of people more adequately in contemporary aquatic ecosystems. This can be achieved by extending ecological baselines, and working with Indigenous peoples, Nations, and descendant communities where ancestral governance systems hold lessons that can assist in restoring aquatic ecosystems. In this way, AHE presents a way to push the boundaries of current archaeozoological (zooarchaeological) research to develop nuanced understandings of applying the lessons of past human behavior in contemporary contexts.

This Research Topic (collection) for Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology focuses on the combination of archaeozoological data and Applied Historical Ecological approaches to highlight under-recognized human transformations of aquatic environments in the past, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of archaeological data to modern marine and aquatic conservation efforts, illustrating the real-world implications for this research in the present and future.

Article types can include general reviews, specific case/site studies but also more method-driven research and overviews of different regions/timeframes. Papers in this research topic include, but are not limited to, applications of archaeozoology to ecosystem conservation management, applied Historical Ecology and traditional ecological knowledge, interdisciplinary investigations of long-and short-term human-environmental interactions in aquatic environments, and novel methodologies for investigating human-environment relationships.

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Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

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