There has been little movement to systematically incorporate the study of indigenous landscape management practices into the method and theory of hunter-gatherer research in North American archaeology, despite a growing interest in this topic. The purposes of this article are twofold. One is to address why, until quite recently, archaeologists have been reluctant to engage in the current debate about the scale and ecological impact of these practices, particularly anthropogenic burning. We argue that this stems from a long tradition of viewing hunter-gatherers as passive, immediate-return foragers, as well as from the daunting methodological challenges of identifying landscape management activities using archaeological data. Our second purpose is to explore how archaeologists can make significant contributions to our understanding of past resource management practices through the creation of new kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary eco-archaeological programs. Based on the current work of scholars in archaeological and environmental disciplines, as well as on our own implementation of such an approach in central California, we discuss the importance of maintaining mutual relationships with local tribes, the challenges of coordinating multiple data sets, and the process of rethinking our analytical methods and temporal scales for undertaking hunter-gatherer studies.

This paper examines the hypothesis that human landscape modifications involving early agriculture contributed to greenhouse gas emissions in preindustrial times, a proposal that has significant implications for the timing of the Anthropocene era. In synthesizing recent papers that both advocate and challenge this hypothesis, we identify a major bias in the ongoing debate, which focuses on the land clearance practices of agrarian people, with insufficient consideration of a diverse range of hunter-gatherer societies who regularly utilized landscape-scale burning for various purposes. Employing California as a case study, we examine how the exclusion of hunter-gatherers from this debate may have shortchanged estimates of human biomass burning in preindustrial times. We also suggest that human population size may be a poor proxy for the degree of land clearance and anthropogenic burning, and we describe how previous approaches to these questions may have underplayed the importance of variation in the timing and magnitude of depopulation in different regions of the Americas.

Although automated approaches to shape analysis and object classification have been widely applied in the biological sciences, technical and time considerations have limited their use in phytolith research. As advanced microscopy systems become more affordable and accessible and digital imaging software provides a wider range of sophisticated analytical tools, there is increased potential for effective use of machinevision and automation in phytolith research. In this paper, we describe technical limitations of phytolith imaging and identify several techniques that might improve results. Drawing on examples of software developed for related disciplines, we then describe a conceptual framework for development and integration of automated phytolith analysis software for: separating phytoliths from non-phytolith material in digital images; segmentation of phytolith boundaries; quantitative phytolith feature extraction, including a discussion of potentially more powerful, non-traditional parameters of phytolith shape and texture; phytolith classification and identification; and phytolith database image retrieval. While recognizing the difficulty of implementing this framework and the need for extensive empirical testing of suggested approaches on phytoliths, we examine the possibility of aggregating quantitative phytolith data collected in studies worldwide to construct a cloud-based database of phytolith images with associated morphotype data.

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