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Title: European Colonialism and the Anthropocene - A View from the Pacific Coast of North America (2013) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Lightfoot, Panich, Schneider and Gonzalez Published: 2013 # of Pages: 15 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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G Model ANCENE-12; No. of Pages 15 Anthropocene xxx (2013) e1-e15 Anthropocene Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Anthropocene . és ELSEVIER journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ancene European colonialism and the Anthropocene: A view from the Pacific Coast of North America Kent G. Lightfoot **, Lee M. Panich > Tsim D. Schneider‘, Sara L. Gonzalez“ * Department of Anthropology, Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, United States > Department of Anthropology, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053-0261, United States © Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, United States 4 Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Box 353100, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, United States ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received 3 May 2013 Received in revised form 11 September 2013 Accepted 25 September 2013 This paper argues that European colonialism from AD 1500 to the early 1800s marked a fundamental transformation in human-environment interactions across much of the world. The rapid founding of various colonial enterprises, particularly mission and managerial colonies, unleashed mission agrarian systems, plantations, fur trade outposts, and commercial fishing and whaling ventures into various tropical and temperate ecosystems in the Americas, Oceania, India, Asia, and Africa, which had tremendous repercussions for indigenous faunal and floral populations. These colonial enterprises placed tremendous pressures on long-standing anthropogenic landscapes leading to significant modifications with the invasion of foreign species, the disruption of native habitats, the extermination of keystone species, and in some places, the loss of biodiversity. We conclude with a case study that considers how anthropogenic environments in Alta and Baja California created by native peoples over many centuries became entangled with mission ranching and commercial fur hunting. Our findings Keywords: Globalization Anthropogenic landscapes Managerial and mission colonies Market hunting Mission agriculture Alta and Baja California support a longer chronology for the Anthropocene than traditionally recognized. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. 1. Introduction When did humans first begin to exert significant influences over the Earth’s environment? In the decade since Crutzen (2002a,b) first began to address this question, most scientists have supported a short chronology (two centuries or less) for the commencement of the Anthropocene, typically beginning with the Industrial Revolution (ca. AD 1800) or the commencement of open air atomic weapons testing in the 1960s that unleashed a globally identifiable signal of radioactive isotopes (Steffen et al., 2011; Zalasiewicz et al., 2011). In contrast, a few other scholars, including the authors in this special issue of the Anthropocene, propose a long chronology for when human domination of the globe started (e.g., Braje and Rick, 2011; Jackson et al., 2001; Rick and Erlandson, 2008; Ruddiman, 2003; Smith and Zelder, 2013). In employing the great time depth of archeological and paleoecological research, they argue that humans have altered the globe’s ecosystems in important and far-reaching ways for millennia. We are tasked with assessing the degree to which anthropogenic transformations took place in early historic times with the * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 510 642 1309. E-mail address: [email protected] (K.G. Lightfoot). 2213-3054/$ see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2013.09.002 dawn of globalization, particularly European colonialism in the Americas from about 1500 to the early 1800s. At this time European nations began an unparalleled global expansion that resulted in unprecedented changes in ecological processes and the health and vitality of indigenous floral and faunal populations across the globe. We recognize that the processes of globalization unleashed at this time, which involved colonization, landscape modifications, long distance exchange, and the extraction of natural resources, were not new to humankind. Regional “world systems” have been identified by archeologists working in the ancient Near East, Mesoamerica, South America, and South Asia (e.g., Champion, 1989; Rowlands et al., 1987). But what was revolutionary about the early modern world system was the magnitude and scale in which it operated and the degree to which local environments were fundamentally transformed. In this paper we make three observations about the early modern world system. First, we are struck by how quickly colonial enterprises overwhelmed many local environments. Many think that industrialization with its global exploitation of resources, pollution, and massive extinctions of organisms was the defining moment when the Anthropocene dawned. Yet many of these processes were already well established in the preceding centuries when European colonialism took place on a global scale (see Mann, 2011 for an excellent synthesis of these rapid developments). We Please cite this article in press as: Lightfoot, K.G., et al., European colonialism and the Anthropocene: A view from the Pacific Coast of North America. Anthropocene (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2013.09.002