ABSTRACT
Archaeologists seek an understanding of small- and large-scale changes in environments and of how humans adapted to those changes. With the development of a more scientific archaeology after the 1960s, archaeologists realized that documenting changes in environment and understanding them were necessary to comprehend and interpret changes in human adaptation. Archaeologists work to reconstruct past environments by formulating and testing models of human adaptation in those environments. Archaeologists use the reconstruction of past vegetation to model ecozones, which then are used to infer animal populations. The archaeological record should show a progressive reduction in the size of individual animals early in the process of domestication. Archaeological understandings of human ecology are central to an understanding of the humans of the past, present, and future. Archaeologists reconstruct the paleoecology of regions to learn how people interacted with, adapted to, and modified their environments and how those environments changed over time.
