Alejandra Domic | Pennsylvania State University (original) (raw)
Books by Alejandra Domic
El Parque Nacional Sajama y sus Plantas, 2010
La publicación presenta los resultados del análisis espacial y temporal sobre la relación entre i... more La publicación presenta los resultados del análisis espacial y temporal sobre la relación entre incendios e inundaciones en el departamento del Beni, en el contexto de cambio climático. El Beni es uno de los departamentos más vulnerables a eventos extremos, por lo cual una gran proporción de la población se encuentra en riesgo al igual que la producción de alimentos de la región. El estudio empleó censores remotos para determinar la ocurrencia e intensidad de los incendios e indicación a lo largo de diez años. La integración del análisis espacial y temporal permitió identificar las condiciones climáticas que crean condiciones favorables para la expansión de los incendios.
La Asociación para la Biología de la Conservación – Bolivia (ACB-B) presenta la publicación "Biod... more La Asociación para la Biología de la Conservación – Bolivia (ACB-B) presenta la publicación "Biodiversidad y Conservación: una Guía Informativa", editada por Alejandra Domic. Libro enfocado en proveer información sobre ecología, biodiversidad, problemas ambientales y conservación, complementada con estudios de caso enfocados en América, especialmente en Bolivia. La publicación se encuentra conformada por diez capítulos, organizados en tres áreas: 1) introducción a la ecología y biodiversidad, 2) problemas ambientales y 3) conservación de la biodiversidad. Para completar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje se incluyen una serie de herramientas pedagógicas, especialmente actividades lúdicas, las cuales permitirán a educadores reforzar los conocimientos aprendidos en cada capítulo
Papers by Alejandra Domic
Journal of social archaeology, Jun 24, 2024
Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herd... more Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient communityenvironment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of humanenvironment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region's ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges.
Plos One, 2023
El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of ... more El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of human-environment interaction spanning the entirety of the Holocene. Botanical materials are remarkably well preserved and include important tree (e.g., ciruela (Spondias), avocado (Persea americana)) and field (maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus), and squash (Cucurbita)) crops. Here we provide a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the sequence. We report 375 radiocarbon dates, a majority of which are for short-lived botanical macrofossils (e.g., maize cobs, avocado seeds, or rinds). Radiocarbon dates were used in combination with stratigraphic details to establish a Bayesian chronology for~9,800 identified botanical samples spanning the last 11,000 years. We estimate that at least 16 discrete intervals of use occurred during this time, separated by gaps of~100-2,000 years. The longest hiatus in rockshelter occupation was between~6,400 and 4,400 years ago and the deposition of botanical remains peaked at~2,000 calendar years before present (cal BP). Tree fruits and squash appeared early in the occupational sequence (~11,000 cal BP) with most other field crops appearing later in time (e.g., maize at~4,400 cal BP; beans at~2,200 cal BP). The early focus on tree fruits and squash is consistent with early coevolutionary partnering with humans as seed dispersers in the wake of megafaunal extinction in Mesoamerica. Tree crops predominated through much of the Holocene, and there was an overall shift to field crops after 4,000 cal BP that was largely driven by increased reliance on maize farming.
Scientific Reports, 2024
The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide ... more The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide and has played an important ecological, economic, and cultural role for millennia. In the American tropics, squashes were among the first cultivated crop species, but little is known about how their domestication unfolded. Here, we employ direct radiocarbon dating and morphological analyses of desiccated cucurbit seeds, rinds, and stems from El Gigante Rockshelter in Honduras to reconstruct human practices of selection and cultivation of Lagenaria siceraria, Cucurbita pepo, and Cucurbita moschata. Direct radiocarbon dating indicates that humans started using Lagenaria and wild Cucurbita starting ~ 10,950 calendar years before present (cal B.P.), primarily as watertight vessels and possibly as cooking and drinking containers. A rind directly dated to 11,150–10,765 cal B.P. represents the oldest known bottle gourd in the Americas. Domesticated C. moschata subsequently appeared ~ 4035 cal B.P., followed by domesticated C. pepo ~ 2190 cal B.P. associated with increasing evidence for their use as food crops. Multivariate statistical analysis of seed size and shape show that the archaeological C. pepo assemblage exhibits significant variability, representing at least three varieties: one similar to present-day zucchini, another like present-day vegetable marrow, and a native cultivar without modern analogs. Our archaeobotanical data supports the hypothesis that Indigenous cucurbit use started in the Early Holocene, and that agricultural complexity during the Late Holocene involved selective breeding that encouraged crop diversification.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2024
Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herd... more Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient community-environment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of human-environment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region’s ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges.
Journal of Field Archaeology, Nov 14, 2022
Ecología en Bolivia - Revista del Instituto de Ecología, Apr 12, 2015
Ecología austral, Apr 1, 2018
The Holocene, 2023
The Late-Holocene history of hydroclimatic variability in the Atacama Desert offers insights into... more The Late-Holocene history of hydroclimatic variability in the Atacama Desert offers insights into the effects of precipitation and humans on ecosystems in one of the most extremely arid regions of the world. However, understanding the effects of regional precipitation variability in relation to local ecological stressors remains to be fully resolved. Here, we present a pollen-based qualitative precipitation reconstruction derived from fossil rodent middens recovered from two sites near Laguna Roja (LRO; n = 25) and Isluga (ISL; n = 15) in the Atacama highlands (19°S) of northern Chile. At LRO, the fossil pollen record shows multi-centennial hydroclimatic anomalies during the last millennium, with wetter than present phases at 1155–1130, 865–670, and 215–80 cal yrs BP, and similar to present conditions between 1005 and 880 cal yrs BP. In contrast, the ISL record shows a wet phase during 1115–840 cal yrs BP, suggesting that meso-ecological processes were as important in vegetation tur...
Ornitología Neotropical
Resumen ∙ Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis son endémicos de Bolivia y se distribuyen en los depa... more Resumen ∙ Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis son endémicos de Bolivia y se distribuyen en los departamentos de La Paz (inmediaciones al nevado Illimani, Quime e Inquisivi) y Cochabamba (Cotacajes). En este estudio, se evaluó el ensamble de aves en cuatro fragmentos de bosque de P. pacensis ubicados en las faldas del nevado Illimani, La Paz, Bolivia. En estos fragmentos de bosque se observaron 31 especies de aves, incluyendo dos especies endémicas de Bolivia, Colibrí Negrito (Aglaeactis pamela) y Pinchaflor Carbonero (Diglossa carbonaria), y dos especies fuertemente especializadas a bosques de Polylepis, Tijeral de Yánac (Leptasthenura yanacensis) y Conirrostro Gigante (Conirostrum binghami). Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis están altamente amenazados por actividades humanas como quema, extracción de leña y agricultura; las cuales podrían estar causando la deforestación y degradación de este importante hábitat para las aves. Es crucial implementar programas de conservación que incluy...
Scientific Reports
People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa ... more People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa and drought exacerbated the effects of predation. However, such explanations are difficult to test due to the scarcity of individual sites with unambiguous traces of humans, introduced taxa, and endemic megaherbivores. We excavated three coastal ponds in arid SW Madagascar and present a unique combination of traces of human activity (modified pygmy hippo bone, processed estuarine shell and fish bone, and charcoal), along with bones of extinct megafauna (giant tortoises, pygmy hippos, and elephant birds), extirpated fauna (e.g., crocodiles), and introduced vertebrates (e.g., zebu cattle). The disappearance of megafauna from the study sites at ~ 1000 years ago followed a relatively arid interval and closely coincides with increasingly frequent traces of human foraging, fire, and pastoralism. Our analyses fail to document drought-associated extirpation or multiple millennia of megafauna hun...
Ecología en Bolivia, 2017
PLOS ONE, 2023
El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of ... more El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of human–environment interaction spanning the entirety of the Holocene. Botanical materials are remarkably well preserved and include important tree (e.g., ciruela (Spondias), avocado (Persea americana)) and field (maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus), and squash (Cucurbita)) crops. Here we provide a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the sequence. We report 375 radiocarbon dates, a majority of which are for short-lived botanical macrofossils (e.g., maize cobs, avocado seeds, or rinds). Radiocarbon dates were used in combination with stratigraphic details to establish a Bayesian chronology for ~9,800 identified botanical samples spanning the last 11,000 years. We estimate that at least 16 discrete intervals of use occurred during this time, separated by gaps of ~100–2,000 years. The longest hiatus in rockshelter occupation was between ~6,400 and 4,400 years ...
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cult... more South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cultivation of various plant species from seemingly contrasting ecosystems. It was the recipient and supplier of crops brought to and from Mesoamerica (such as maize and cacao, respectively), and Polynesia to where the key staple crop sweet potato was exported. Not every instance of the trans-ecological expansion of cultivated plants (both domesticated and wild), however, resulted in successful farming. Here, we review the transregional circulation and introduction of five food tropical crops originated in the tropical and humid valleys of the eastern Andes—achira, cassava, ahipa, sweet potato, and pacay—to the hyper-arid coastal valleys of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where they have been found in early archeological sites. By means of an evaluation of the contexts of their deposition and supported by direct radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes analyses, and starch grain analysis, w...
En este capítulo se explora la aplicación del programa MaxEnt, usando como input los sitios asign... more En este capítulo se explora la aplicación del programa MaxEnt, usando como input los sitios asignados a la entidad arqueológica Goya-Malabrigo, con dos objetivos principales: a) precisar objetivamente los parámetros ambientales asociados a la distribución geográfica (el climatic envelope niche, Post 2013) de esta entidad arqueológica y b) estimar el área mas apta para la distribución de esta entidad en base a dichos parámetros ambientales. Tambien se aborda con el pregrama MaxEnt la distribución de los sitios guaraníes del NEA con el objetivo de compararla con el área apta de ocupación de Goya-Malabrigo.Fil: Politis, Gustavo Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano; ArgentinaFil: Domic, Alejandra I.....
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
Significance Maize is a global food staple with great economic and cultural importance. Archaeoge... more Significance Maize is a global food staple with great economic and cultural importance. Archaeogenomic studies have revealed a process of protracted maize domestication and multiple waves of human-mediated dispersal in the Americas. Maize first arrived in South America as a partial domesticate, where the domestication syndrome became independently fixed and improved varieties developed away from the influence of wild gene flow. We demonstrate that hybrids of some of these improved varieties were likely reintroduced back to Central America. We hypothesize that this backflow of South American genetic material may have contributed to the development of a more productive staple, which was related to the growth and aggregation of human populations, and the formation of more complex social and political structures regionally.
El Parque Nacional Sajama y sus Plantas, 2010
La publicación presenta los resultados del análisis espacial y temporal sobre la relación entre i... more La publicación presenta los resultados del análisis espacial y temporal sobre la relación entre incendios e inundaciones en el departamento del Beni, en el contexto de cambio climático. El Beni es uno de los departamentos más vulnerables a eventos extremos, por lo cual una gran proporción de la población se encuentra en riesgo al igual que la producción de alimentos de la región. El estudio empleó censores remotos para determinar la ocurrencia e intensidad de los incendios e indicación a lo largo de diez años. La integración del análisis espacial y temporal permitió identificar las condiciones climáticas que crean condiciones favorables para la expansión de los incendios.
La Asociación para la Biología de la Conservación – Bolivia (ACB-B) presenta la publicación "Biod... more La Asociación para la Biología de la Conservación – Bolivia (ACB-B) presenta la publicación "Biodiversidad y Conservación: una Guía Informativa", editada por Alejandra Domic. Libro enfocado en proveer información sobre ecología, biodiversidad, problemas ambientales y conservación, complementada con estudios de caso enfocados en América, especialmente en Bolivia. La publicación se encuentra conformada por diez capítulos, organizados en tres áreas: 1) introducción a la ecología y biodiversidad, 2) problemas ambientales y 3) conservación de la biodiversidad. Para completar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje se incluyen una serie de herramientas pedagógicas, especialmente actividades lúdicas, las cuales permitirán a educadores reforzar los conocimientos aprendidos en cada capítulo
Journal of social archaeology, Jun 24, 2024
Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herd... more Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient communityenvironment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of humanenvironment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region's ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges.
Plos One, 2023
El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of ... more El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of human-environment interaction spanning the entirety of the Holocene. Botanical materials are remarkably well preserved and include important tree (e.g., ciruela (Spondias), avocado (Persea americana)) and field (maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus), and squash (Cucurbita)) crops. Here we provide a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the sequence. We report 375 radiocarbon dates, a majority of which are for short-lived botanical macrofossils (e.g., maize cobs, avocado seeds, or rinds). Radiocarbon dates were used in combination with stratigraphic details to establish a Bayesian chronology for~9,800 identified botanical samples spanning the last 11,000 years. We estimate that at least 16 discrete intervals of use occurred during this time, separated by gaps of~100-2,000 years. The longest hiatus in rockshelter occupation was between~6,400 and 4,400 years ago and the deposition of botanical remains peaked at~2,000 calendar years before present (cal BP). Tree fruits and squash appeared early in the occupational sequence (~11,000 cal BP) with most other field crops appearing later in time (e.g., maize at~4,400 cal BP; beans at~2,200 cal BP). The early focus on tree fruits and squash is consistent with early coevolutionary partnering with humans as seed dispersers in the wake of megafaunal extinction in Mesoamerica. Tree crops predominated through much of the Holocene, and there was an overall shift to field crops after 4,000 cal BP that was largely driven by increased reliance on maize farming.
Scientific Reports, 2024
The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide ... more The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide and has played an important ecological, economic, and cultural role for millennia. In the American tropics, squashes were among the first cultivated crop species, but little is known about how their domestication unfolded. Here, we employ direct radiocarbon dating and morphological analyses of desiccated cucurbit seeds, rinds, and stems from El Gigante Rockshelter in Honduras to reconstruct human practices of selection and cultivation of Lagenaria siceraria, Cucurbita pepo, and Cucurbita moschata. Direct radiocarbon dating indicates that humans started using Lagenaria and wild Cucurbita starting ~ 10,950 calendar years before present (cal B.P.), primarily as watertight vessels and possibly as cooking and drinking containers. A rind directly dated to 11,150–10,765 cal B.P. represents the oldest known bottle gourd in the Americas. Domesticated C. moschata subsequently appeared ~ 4035 cal B.P., followed by domesticated C. pepo ~ 2190 cal B.P. associated with increasing evidence for their use as food crops. Multivariate statistical analysis of seed size and shape show that the archaeological C. pepo assemblage exhibits significant variability, representing at least three varieties: one similar to present-day zucchini, another like present-day vegetable marrow, and a native cultivar without modern analogs. Our archaeobotanical data supports the hypothesis that Indigenous cucurbit use started in the Early Holocene, and that agricultural complexity during the Late Holocene involved selective breeding that encouraged crop diversification.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2024
Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herd... more Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient community-environment dynamics can help identify pathways to livelihood sustainability. Multidisciplinary approaches have great potential to improve our understanding of human-environment interactions across spatio-temporal scales. We combine archaeological survey data, oral history interviews, and high-resolution multispectral PlanetScope imagery to explore 400 years of human-environment interaction in the Namonte Basin. Our analysis reveals that settlement and land-use led to significant changes in the region’s ecology, both during periods of occupation and after settlement abandonment. Human activity over this period may have stabilized vegetative systems, whereby seasonal changes in vegetative health were reduced compared to surrounding locations. These ecological legacies may have buffered communities against unpredictable climate challenges.
Journal of Field Archaeology, Nov 14, 2022
Ecología en Bolivia - Revista del Instituto de Ecología, Apr 12, 2015
Ecología austral, Apr 1, 2018
The Holocene, 2023
The Late-Holocene history of hydroclimatic variability in the Atacama Desert offers insights into... more The Late-Holocene history of hydroclimatic variability in the Atacama Desert offers insights into the effects of precipitation and humans on ecosystems in one of the most extremely arid regions of the world. However, understanding the effects of regional precipitation variability in relation to local ecological stressors remains to be fully resolved. Here, we present a pollen-based qualitative precipitation reconstruction derived from fossil rodent middens recovered from two sites near Laguna Roja (LRO; n = 25) and Isluga (ISL; n = 15) in the Atacama highlands (19°S) of northern Chile. At LRO, the fossil pollen record shows multi-centennial hydroclimatic anomalies during the last millennium, with wetter than present phases at 1155–1130, 865–670, and 215–80 cal yrs BP, and similar to present conditions between 1005 and 880 cal yrs BP. In contrast, the ISL record shows a wet phase during 1115–840 cal yrs BP, suggesting that meso-ecological processes were as important in vegetation tur...
Ornitología Neotropical
Resumen ∙ Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis son endémicos de Bolivia y se distribuyen en los depa... more Resumen ∙ Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis son endémicos de Bolivia y se distribuyen en los departamentos de La Paz (inmediaciones al nevado Illimani, Quime e Inquisivi) y Cochabamba (Cotacajes). En este estudio, se evaluó el ensamble de aves en cuatro fragmentos de bosque de P. pacensis ubicados en las faldas del nevado Illimani, La Paz, Bolivia. En estos fragmentos de bosque se observaron 31 especies de aves, incluyendo dos especies endémicas de Bolivia, Colibrí Negrito (Aglaeactis pamela) y Pinchaflor Carbonero (Diglossa carbonaria), y dos especies fuertemente especializadas a bosques de Polylepis, Tijeral de Yánac (Leptasthenura yanacensis) y Conirrostro Gigante (Conirostrum binghami). Los bosques de Polylepis pacensis están altamente amenazados por actividades humanas como quema, extracción de leña y agricultura; las cuales podrían estar causando la deforestación y degradación de este importante hábitat para las aves. Es crucial implementar programas de conservación que incluy...
Scientific Reports
People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa ... more People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa and drought exacerbated the effects of predation. However, such explanations are difficult to test due to the scarcity of individual sites with unambiguous traces of humans, introduced taxa, and endemic megaherbivores. We excavated three coastal ponds in arid SW Madagascar and present a unique combination of traces of human activity (modified pygmy hippo bone, processed estuarine shell and fish bone, and charcoal), along with bones of extinct megafauna (giant tortoises, pygmy hippos, and elephant birds), extirpated fauna (e.g., crocodiles), and introduced vertebrates (e.g., zebu cattle). The disappearance of megafauna from the study sites at ~ 1000 years ago followed a relatively arid interval and closely coincides with increasingly frequent traces of human foraging, fire, and pastoralism. Our analyses fail to document drought-associated extirpation or multiple millennia of megafauna hun...
Ecología en Bolivia, 2017
PLOS ONE, 2023
El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of ... more El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of human–environment interaction spanning the entirety of the Holocene. Botanical materials are remarkably well preserved and include important tree (e.g., ciruela (Spondias), avocado (Persea americana)) and field (maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus), and squash (Cucurbita)) crops. Here we provide a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the sequence. We report 375 radiocarbon dates, a majority of which are for short-lived botanical macrofossils (e.g., maize cobs, avocado seeds, or rinds). Radiocarbon dates were used in combination with stratigraphic details to establish a Bayesian chronology for ~9,800 identified botanical samples spanning the last 11,000 years. We estimate that at least 16 discrete intervals of use occurred during this time, separated by gaps of ~100–2,000 years. The longest hiatus in rockshelter occupation was between ~6,400 and 4,400 years ...
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cult... more South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cultivation of various plant species from seemingly contrasting ecosystems. It was the recipient and supplier of crops brought to and from Mesoamerica (such as maize and cacao, respectively), and Polynesia to where the key staple crop sweet potato was exported. Not every instance of the trans-ecological expansion of cultivated plants (both domesticated and wild), however, resulted in successful farming. Here, we review the transregional circulation and introduction of five food tropical crops originated in the tropical and humid valleys of the eastern Andes—achira, cassava, ahipa, sweet potato, and pacay—to the hyper-arid coastal valleys of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where they have been found in early archeological sites. By means of an evaluation of the contexts of their deposition and supported by direct radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes analyses, and starch grain analysis, w...
En este capítulo se explora la aplicación del programa MaxEnt, usando como input los sitios asign... more En este capítulo se explora la aplicación del programa MaxEnt, usando como input los sitios asignados a la entidad arqueológica Goya-Malabrigo, con dos objetivos principales: a) precisar objetivamente los parámetros ambientales asociados a la distribución geográfica (el climatic envelope niche, Post 2013) de esta entidad arqueológica y b) estimar el área mas apta para la distribución de esta entidad en base a dichos parámetros ambientales. Tambien se aborda con el pregrama MaxEnt la distribución de los sitios guaraníes del NEA con el objetivo de compararla con el área apta de ocupación de Goya-Malabrigo.Fil: Politis, Gustavo Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano; ArgentinaFil: Domic, Alejandra I.....
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
Significance Maize is a global food staple with great economic and cultural importance. Archaeoge... more Significance Maize is a global food staple with great economic and cultural importance. Archaeogenomic studies have revealed a process of protracted maize domestication and multiple waves of human-mediated dispersal in the Americas. Maize first arrived in South America as a partial domesticate, where the domestication syndrome became independently fixed and improved varieties developed away from the influence of wild gene flow. We demonstrate that hybrids of some of these improved varieties were likely reintroduced back to Central America. We hypothesize that this backflow of South American genetic material may have contributed to the development of a more productive staple, which was related to the growth and aggregation of human populations, and the formation of more complex social and political structures regionally.
Quaternary, 2018
The European conquest of the New World produced major socio-environmental reorganization in the A... more The European conquest of the New World produced major socio-environmental reorganization in the Americas, but for many specific regions and ecosystems, we still do not understand how these changes occurred within a broader temporal framework. In this paper, we reconstruct the long-term environmental and vegetation changes experienced by high-altitude wetlands of the southcentral Andes over the last two millennia. Pollen and charcoal analyses of a 5.5-m-long core recovered from the semi-arid puna of northern Chile indicate that while climatic drivers influenced vegetation turnaround, human land use and management strategies significantly affected long-term changes. Our results indicate that the puna vegetation mostly dominated by grasslands and some peatland taxa stabilized during the late Holocene, xerophytic shrubs expanded during extremely dry events, and peatland vegetation persisted in relation to landscape-scale management strategies by Andean pastoralist societies. Environment...
International Journal of Plant Sciences, 2017
Premise of research. Anemophily is considered to be a mechanism that evolved to promote pollinati... more Premise of research. Anemophily is considered to be a mechanism that evolved to promote pollination success. However, reproductive output can decrease if pollen loads are scarce due to low abundance of compatible mates or floral infections. Here we analyze the effects of breeding system, pollen limitation, and a potential floral fungal infection on the reproductive output of the Andean tree Polylepis tomentella (Rosaceae). Methodology. We performed pollen supplementation experiments in the field to assess the extent of the effect of pollen limitation on fruit and seed set and to identify any pre- or postzygotic self-incompatibility responses within receptive pistils. Supplementary scanning electron microscopy and epifluorescence microscopy were used to observe the possible effects of a potential floral fungal infection on sexual reproduction. Pivotal results. Pollen supplementation did not increase fruit and seed set, suggesting weak evidence of pollen limitation. Most stigmas from self- and cross-pollinated flowers showed germinated pollen grains and pollen tubes in the style, indicating that the species exhibits prezygotic self-compatibility. The presence of three Ascomycota genera in stigmas and styles appears to have negatively affected the germination of pollen grains by inhibiting pollen tube growth, but we did not find evidence suggesting that hyphae are able to penetrate the ovary. Conclusions. This study showed that P. tomentella possesses a prezygotic self-compatible system and that fruit and seed set are not affected by pollen limitation. Therefore, reproductive assurance is achieved through pollen transfer between plants by wind and the role played by self-compatibility that allows selfing in the species. However, it is possible that the potential fungal infection could reduce the fecundity of its tree host, as hyphae are able to penetrate pollen grains.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2016