Emily Lena Jones is a writer, photographer, and professor of anthropology and faculty associate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute and Center for Stable Isotopes at the University of New Mexico. She studies past human-environment interactions through the lens of archaeological animal remains, with a particular interest in the connections between humans, non-human animals, and environmental change.
By Emily Lena Jones & Jacob L Fisher
Questioning Rebound explores the archaeological record of the Americas during the period immediately following European contact, a time when the human footprint on the land abruptly shifted. During this era of disease-driven mortality, genocide, incarceration, and forced labor of Indigenous peoples, American landscapes changed in fundamental ways, producing short-lived ecosystems that later became the basis of myths regarding the natural state of environments across the Americas. Questioning Rebound explores the causes of environmental change during the period following European contact, featuring case studies throughout the Americas. While both the record for and the apparent causes of the changes in the human footprint vary, the record of post- contact environmental change consistently reflects the impacts of past social upheaval.
The people who inhabited Southwest Europe from 30,000 to 13,000 years ago are often portrayed as big game hunters – and indeed, in some locations (Cantabrian Spain, the Pyrenees, the Dordogne) the archaeological record supports this interpretation. But in other places, notably Mediterranean Iberia, the inhabitants focused their hunting efforts on smaller game, such as rabbits, fish, and birds. Were they less effective hunters? Were these environments depleted of red deer and other large game? Or is this evidence of Paleolithic people’s adaptability?
This volume explores these questions, along the way delving into the history of the “bigger equals better” assumption; optimal foraging theory and niche construction theory; and patterns of environmental and subsistence change across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.
I am an environmental archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and director of the UNM Zooarchaeology Lab. My research focuses on the connections between human-animal relationships and environmental change in the past.
Among other topics, I have studied the differences (and similarities) in Neanderthal and anatomically modern human diets in Southwestern Europe; changing human-environment relationships immediately following European colonization of the Americas; and spread of the horse in the post-1492 CE North American west.
You can learn more about my academic work at my UNM website.
