In the case of Polynesia, the Caribbean, and the Channel Islands, human transformation of island ecosystems began at initial colonization and often accelerated

through time as populations grew and human activities intensified. The maritime agriculturalists that occupied Polynesia and the Caribbean often had a similar pattern of occupation with early records documenting significant anthropogenic burning and landscape clearance, a new suite of intentionally and accidentally introduced plants and animals that were part of transported landscapes, followed by soil erosion and later highly Tanespimycin clinical trial managed anthropogenic landscapes. The pattern identified in these two island regions is similar to the records of islands in the North Atlantic occupied by Neolithic and Viking Age peoples (McGovern et al., 2007 and Perdikaris and McGovern, 2008) and Mediterranean islands (Patton, 1996; Zeder, 2009). Island archeology also reveals important differences in the scale and magnitude

of human environmental impacts. On the Channel Islands and some Caribbean islands, initial human occupations were by maritime hunter-gatherers. The environmental impacts of these early peoples selleckchem is often not as rapid, easy to discern, or as clear as those of pastoralists or agriculturalists. Without domesticated plants and animals (except dogs) or the need to clear land for horticulture, for example, early records of human occupation from California’s Channel Islands generally lack the initial burning, landscape clearing, and soil erosion typical of many Polynesian sequences. Anthropogenic burning is evident on the Channel Islands in the past, but these events are not easy to differentiate from natural fires (Anderson et al., 2010b). Still hunter-gatherers transformed their island ecosystems in major ways, including the translocation of animals, direct and indirect influences on the extinction of mammals and birds, fire and burning, and significant impacts on marine resources. On the Channel Islands, these include translocation of island deer mice, island foxes, and perhaps other organisms

(Rick, 2013), and strong influences on island marine ecosystems and organisms (Erlandson and Rick, 2010). The early record of some Caribbean islands also documents extinction of island sloths and other vertebrates, and translocation of plant resources by hunter-gatherer click here populations (Newsom and Wing, 2004:128; Steadman et al., 2005). These data suggest that there was no single, overarching human influence or impact on island ecosystems in the past—the patterns and processes on islands were complex and related to the subsistence strategies of people occupying the island (i.e., agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers), the population densities of those people, their sociocultural systems and technologies, differences in island physical characteristics (size, age, nutrients, etc.), and the collective decisions made by individual societies.