Abstract

There are well over 100 palaeoenvironmental records from Alberta, spanning the range of the postglacial. Yet, of all the factors that are used to account for vegetation changes in these records, human agency is rarely invoked. Underlying much of the analysis is an implicit assumption that the contemporary landscape is 'natural' and the product of natural processes. Consciously or not, people are considered to be outside these natural processes. Human agency is only used as an explanation for vegetation changes in the Late Holocene, following EuroCanadian settlement. Perhaps this mirrors another implicit assumption, that only settlement and agriculture, with concomitant land clearance, can leave a signal in the vegetation record. Records will need to be sampled at much higher resolution than hitherto to detect the more subtle changes in vegetation likely to arise from the activity of hunter-gatherers. Fire history appears one of the most promising lines of investigation. Indeed there is considerable urgency in disentangling anthropogenic and climatic signals in the fire records from the perspective of land-managers concerned with reinstating 'natural' fire regimes in areas such as National Parks. There has also been remarkably little palaeoethnobotanical research in Alberta, although work at Saskatoon Mountain shows that there is great potential in favourable preservation locales. Perhaps this arises from palaeoethnobotanists' concentration on cultigens, which are unlikely to be present in Alberta. The challenge for both these disciplines will be to devise criteria for the recognition of plant use and vegetation modification by people where exotics are not present as an indicator of human presence.