3.00 Credits
This course explores the manner in which Native Americans of eastern North America interacted with and were in turn influenced by the ecological systems within which they lived from the end of the last ice age to the contact period, approximately 14,000 – 200 years before present. During this time, the ecosystems of eastern North America responded in complex ways to multiple environmental modulators including climate perturbations, species migrations and extinctions, natural disturbance agents (fire, storms), soil development processes, and human land-use impacts related to changing settlement systems and subsistence economies. Human societies were in turn influenced by the regional diversity of environmental contexts, which provided multiple dynamic pathways for cultural innovation across space and time.