The visibility of past trees and woodland: testing the value of insect remains

The reconstruction of woodland history is important in relation to archaeological, ecological, biogeographical and evolutionary problems, and insect remains are a significant source of relevant information. Fully natural interglacial and Holocene ‘waterlogged’ deposits assumed to have formed in woodland generally contain abundant macrofossils of both plants and insects indicative of trees. In contrast, British archaeological deposits rich in macrofossil remains of trees often lack, or contain very few, tree-associated insects. To cast light on this contradiction, assemblages of insect (Coleoptera and Hemiptera) remains from a range of modern deposits with various spatial relationships to woodland and trees have been analysed. The proportions of tree-associated insects varied greatly. There was a general trend from higher values in woodland and near to isolated trees of species supporting a rich insect fauna, to low or zero values where there were no trees. However, low values sometimes occurred in woods or near trees, so that rarity of tree-associated insects in archaeological deposits does not always carry the implication of a treeless environment. Further investigation is suggested, with emphasis on the importance of identifying isolated trees, scrub and hedges as a resource for humans and wildlife in the past.     

Flies,manure, and window screens: medical entomology and environmental reform in early-twentieth-century US cities

This paper traces responses to house flies in US cities as health departments attempted to control pollution and disease in the early twentieth century. It speaks to other historical geographies about the state, citizens, and the urban environment by showing how medical entomology prescribed contradictory changes to civic and domestic space, and how urban people and nature resisted these changes. With the advent of medical entomology, health reformers came to see house flies as agents that wove the entire city together as an interconnected ecology, carrying diseases from neighborhood to neighborhood and across the threshold of the home. But different reformers argued for quite distinct exercises of power in the urban landscape and ecological processes. Some physicians and entomologists argued that the state must modernize networks of fly-breeding organic matter, most notably horse manure and human waste. Such interventions were intended to be preventive and holistic, and aimed to protect all city dwellers. Other reformers, however, doubted the capacity of the state to tame material flows of waste, and instead sought changes to domestic space that would require householders – especially women – to shore up the boundaries of the house against flies. When city governments adopted these distinct interventions they encountered quite distinct sorts of resistance because of the house fly's tight links with urban nature and domestic practices.     

The utility of livestock dung for reconstructing recent ethnological and environmental histories

Animal dung is evaluated here as a tool to reconstruct recent societal and environmental changes. Studies completed on the macro- and micro-contents from dung deposited in a mountain cave in Catalonia during the 1970–1980s, preceding the socio-economic changes in the area, was supplemented by the testimony of the last shepherd alive in the area. This information was also compared with evidence from aerial photographs of the area surrounding the cave taken in 1956 and 2009. Although taphonomic distortion of the dung shape precluded its assignment to its producers based on morphology, information from the organic remains reflects the agro-pastoral activities in the mountainous area of the Catalan coast. A lack of calcium phosphate and abundant phytolith and epidermal remains from wild species indicates that the dung was excreted by ovicaprines, who sheltered in the cave during spells of adverse weather. These indicators also signify that the animals fed only on natural vegetation. Insect remains in the dung include fragments of chafers, dung and ground beetles, bees and ants, and whilst the latter may have foraged in the cave, the others may have been accidentally ingested by herbivores. The nannofossils and diatoms found in the dung derive from tertiary crops 4 km away from the cave but within the range of the ovicaprine herd. The lack of cereal and vegetable remains in the dung is consistent with the ethnographic record that shepherds and farmers could not afford to supplement the herds’ diet with fodder crops or grain, a consequence of the low productivity of the local subsistence agriculture. This study further discusses the socio-economic impacts of the introduction of intensive farming, industrialisation and tourism in Catalonia during the latter part of the last century and how they are represented in the dung.     

Insect species associations characterise past occupation sites

Assemblages of insects, mainly beetles (Coleoptera) from nine archaeological occupation sites in Northern England and one in Northern Ireland have been analysed statistically (principally using Spearman's rank-order correlation between pairs of species) in order to identify associations of taxa. Some sites gave strong and fairly discrete groupings, which could be related to individual insect habitats, or spatially or successionally related habitats, or to taphonomic pathways. Where less sharp groupings were identified, they included elements from those seen repeatedly elsewhere and appeared to reflect the character of the site, for example juxtaposition of habitats (as in stable manure), very uniform conditions, or rarity of insect habitats. It is concluded that, with suitable caution, analyses of this kind represent a transferable methodology of great value in obtaining archaeologically relevant information, as well as in improving our understanding of the way insects adapted to artificial habitats in the past.