This dissertation employed an integrated conceptual model and methodology derived from historical ecology, paleoecology, and archaeology to examine the relationship between evolving prehistoric Native American land-use impacts on vegetation dynamics and their relationship to environmental gradients and coeval paleoclimate change over a ~4400-year period in western and central New York State, USA. The historical ecological component of this study utilized late-18th century CE vegetation data derived from land survey records (LSRs) in conjunction with digital, georeferenced archaeological site location data to evaluate the relationship between agricultural Iroquoian settlement patterns and the distribution of major environmental gradients modulating regional vegetation dynamics prior to widespread Euro-American settlement. Results of non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS), detrended correspondence analysis (DCA), and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) indicated the presence of a primary environmental gradient related to fire frequency, which displayed a clear spatial association with the distribution of archaeological sites. Minor gradients associated with soil productivity and canopy density also exhibited spatial correspondences with Native American settlement patterns. Use of combined compositional (bearing tree taxa) and structural (qualitative descriptors of vegetation/landscape form and appearance) data from the LSRs provided greater detail and subtlety in the vegetation ordinations and classifications, clarifying the likely ecological effects and geographic extent of protohistoric and historic Native American populations on the regional landscape. Paleoecological analysis of a kettle peatland sediment core from the study area revealed a similar primacy of fire frequency through time. The kettle’s pollen record documented an initial period (~4400 – 2500 cal. yr BP) of centennial-scale oscillation between fire-tolerant and fire-intolerant pollen taxa, strongly suggesting quasi-cyclic climate modulation. A collapse of this cyclicity becomes evident between ~2500 and 2200 cal. yr BP, with a unidirectional trend toward more numerous fire-tolerant pollen taxa and associated forest community types. The onset of this change is broadly coeval with the earliest appearance of Zea mays (maize) in the regional archaeological record. A subsequent exponential increase in non-arboreal pollen indicators of openland habitat is temporally associated with the arrival of fully agricultural Iroquoian populations within a 20-km radius of the kettle after ~800 cal. yr BP. These findings suggest a dual-phase model for the development of anthropogenic land-use impacts on the regional vegetation, which are hypothesized to have been largely modulated by developing human subsistence patterns.
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