Ecological Legacies of Pre-Columbian Settlements Evident in Palm Clusters of Neotropical Mountain Forests
This research addresses the problem of understanding ancient human impacts on modern ecosystems for archaeologists and ecologists, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled the problem of quantifying the spatial extent of pre-Columbian ecological influence on Neotropical forests by using deep learning and remote sensing to analyze palm tree distributions near archaeological sites in Colombia, finding that palm clusters near large infrastructure sites were significantly more abundant and up to two orders of magnitude larger than previously estimated.
Ancient populations markedly transformed Neotropical forests, yet the spatial extent of their ecological influence remains underexplored at high resolution. Here we present a deep learning and remote sensing based approach to estimate areas of pre-Columbian forest modification based on modern vegetation. We apply this method to high-resolution satellite imagery from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, as a demonstration of a scalable approach, to evaluate palm tree distributions in relation to archaeological infrastructure. Palms were significantly more abundant near archaeological sites with large infrastructure investment. The extent of the largest palm cluster indicates that ancient human-managed areas linked to major infrastructure sites may be up to two orders of magnitude bigger than indicated by current archaeological evidence alone. Our findings suggest that pre-Columbian populations influenced vegetation, fostering conditions conducive to palm proliferation, leaving a lasting ecological footprint. This may have lowered the logistical costs of establishing infrastructure-heavy settlements in less accessible locations.