Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PANTROPOCENE (PANTROPOCENE: Finding a Pre-industrial, Pan-tropical ‘Anthropocene’)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30
Tropical forests are critical to the future of our species. By 2050, the tropics will be home to two thirds of the world’s human children. Meanwhile, tropical forests house over half of the Earth’s biodiversity, influence climate systems, and are critical to the carbon cycle. Combined effects of local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks of relevance to all of us, including efforts to keep post-industrial warming below 2.0°C. Indeed, human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the ‘Anthropocene’ - or the epoch in which humans have come to dominate earth systems. Despite often stereotypically being considered ‘pristine’ blanks on the map of human history, emerging archaeological and historical evidence is highlighting the long-term and extensive nature of past social interactions with these environments.
This raises the question: could pre-industrial human land-use change have resulted in significant earth systems feedbacks that have left legacies for the environments and societies of the present? Particularly notable in this regard are the potential effects of the arrival of European colonialism in the tropics, with pan-tropical empires, such as those of Iberia, seeking to control and exploit equatorial forests, flora, fauna, minerals, resources, and people. This, in turn, followed millennia of Indigenous forest management with possible implications for earth systems. Yet, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts.
The PANTROPOCENE project aims to address this issue by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for innovatively combining archaeology, history, and environmental science to develop ‘pan-tropical’ spatial assessments of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land-use. PANTROPOCENE is undertaking novel environmental coring, remote sensing, archaeology, and archival work in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies and novel, global trading networks, that can be compared to data from the Neotropics, to explore the spatial and temporal dimensions of past tropical land use change on a ‘pan-tropical’ scale. The results will be used in earth systems model to inform understandings of the pace and threat of contemporary land-use changes in the context of endemic Island Southeast Asian biodiversity and the tropics more broadly.
This raises the question: could pre-industrial human land-use change have resulted in significant earth systems feedbacks that have left legacies for the environments and societies of the present? Particularly notable in this regard are the potential effects of the arrival of European colonialism in the tropics, with pan-tropical empires, such as those of Iberia, seeking to control and exploit equatorial forests, flora, fauna, minerals, resources, and people. This, in turn, followed millennia of Indigenous forest management with possible implications for earth systems. Yet, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts.
The PANTROPOCENE project aims to address this issue by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for innovatively combining archaeology, history, and environmental science to develop ‘pan-tropical’ spatial assessments of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land-use. PANTROPOCENE is undertaking novel environmental coring, remote sensing, archaeology, and archival work in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies and novel, global trading networks, that can be compared to data from the Neotropics, to explore the spatial and temporal dimensions of past tropical land use change on a ‘pan-tropical’ scale. The results will be used in earth systems model to inform understandings of the pace and threat of contemporary land-use changes in the context of endemic Island Southeast Asian biodiversity and the tropics more broadly.
The PANTROPOCENE project began by producing a novel evaluation of past human interactions with plants, animals, and landscapes in the Philippines over the last 6,000 years, spanning pre-colonial trade centres through the arrival of Spanish colonialism. This output provides the framework for the collection of new data for the rest of the project. PANTROPOCENE has also collected new environmental cores from lakes and swamps in key areas of historical land use change across the Archipelago, including near Manila, which are being analyzed by state-of-the-art methods to determine past changes in forest cover, fire frequency, and soil stability. These novel environmental data have already been fed into the first pan-tropical assessment of human forest impacts during the colonial period published by the project team in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The PANTROPOCENE project has also initiated new archival investigation of Spanish and American colonial records stored in the Philippines, Spain, and the USA. The information collected here is providing a critical resource for building past land use maps that can be compared to those available for the 21st century. Following a large international workshop, including a wide variety of scholars from the Philippines, the project has also now developed its methodological framework for combining archaeological, historical, and environmental science datasets into past models of land use overtime. This framework has already been used to model the environmental impacts of the famous UNESCO Ifugao rice terraces in an Open Access article in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Beyond its major scientific achievements PANTROPOCENE has also achieved major goals in the context of outreach. The PI has written the popular book ‘Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World and Us’. First, published in 2021 in the UK, and translated into multiple languages, the book represents a truly inter-disciplinary approach to tropical forests in the Earth’s history and highlights the significance of these ecosystems, and human interactions with them, in the public realm. PANTROPOCENE has also developed close connections with the Philippines heritage charity Tuklas, and its outputs are already being taught in local University courses. The project website has also expanded to become the ‘Pantropica’ network for researchers working across the project, hosting podcasts and blogs from Early Career Researchers from around the tropics.
The PANTROPOCENE project has also initiated new archival investigation of Spanish and American colonial records stored in the Philippines, Spain, and the USA. The information collected here is providing a critical resource for building past land use maps that can be compared to those available for the 21st century. Following a large international workshop, including a wide variety of scholars from the Philippines, the project has also now developed its methodological framework for combining archaeological, historical, and environmental science datasets into past models of land use overtime. This framework has already been used to model the environmental impacts of the famous UNESCO Ifugao rice terraces in an Open Access article in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Beyond its major scientific achievements PANTROPOCENE has also achieved major goals in the context of outreach. The PI has written the popular book ‘Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World and Us’. First, published in 2021 in the UK, and translated into multiple languages, the book represents a truly inter-disciplinary approach to tropical forests in the Earth’s history and highlights the significance of these ecosystems, and human interactions with them, in the public realm. PANTROPOCENE has also developed close connections with the Philippines heritage charity Tuklas, and its outputs are already being taught in local University courses. The project website has also expanded to become the ‘Pantropica’ network for researchers working across the project, hosting podcasts and blogs from Early Career Researchers from around the tropics.
The PANTROPOCENE project has made major advances in the development of close ties between scholars from Germany and the Philippines, most notably between the Max Planck Society and the University of the Philippines. Exchange of knowledge is occurring in both directions and students and researchers from both countries are being trained in interdisciplinary approaches to human history in the tropics. Collaborations with the University of the Philippines, as well as Ateneo University and Partido State University, are ensuring that the aims and results of the project are fit closely within core local academic interests and agendas. Further, lasting collaborative exchange is planned with workshops in the Philippines and Germany, research stays, and jointly-organised museum exhibits.
High impact, novel datasets and outputs are expected to result from the diverse chemical, geological, and physical analyses of the core materials obtained, exploring how human impacts on local forests and landscapes have changed over the course of the past 2,000 years. Analysis of the archival data is also expected to provide unparalleled insights into how changing systems of colonialism have altered crop productivity and deforestation, potentially yielding insights into the origins of the major issues the Philippines faces today in this regard. New archaeological and survey excavations in late 2022 and 2023, as well as the first archaeologically-focused LiDAR remote sensing surveys in the Philippines, are also expected to provide important datasets for local heritage initiatives and insights into pre-colonial and colonial subsistence, settlement systems, and building methods.
The novel data obtained in this regard will continue to be converted into land use models for the Philippines at a series of time slices, enabling comparison between different key historical periods. These models will then be applied to available models of precipitation, carbon cycling, and soil erosion for the region to explore whether human land use at different points in the past was significant enough to initiate earth systems feedbacks at a regional scale. The expansion of this approach to a pan-tropical level is also anticipated. If successful, this would represent the successful conclusion of the project and provide an important methodological framework for the integration of archaeological and historical datasets into discussions of earth systems science and changing human influences on our planet.
High impact, novel datasets and outputs are expected to result from the diverse chemical, geological, and physical analyses of the core materials obtained, exploring how human impacts on local forests and landscapes have changed over the course of the past 2,000 years. Analysis of the archival data is also expected to provide unparalleled insights into how changing systems of colonialism have altered crop productivity and deforestation, potentially yielding insights into the origins of the major issues the Philippines faces today in this regard. New archaeological and survey excavations in late 2022 and 2023, as well as the first archaeologically-focused LiDAR remote sensing surveys in the Philippines, are also expected to provide important datasets for local heritage initiatives and insights into pre-colonial and colonial subsistence, settlement systems, and building methods.
The novel data obtained in this regard will continue to be converted into land use models for the Philippines at a series of time slices, enabling comparison between different key historical periods. These models will then be applied to available models of precipitation, carbon cycling, and soil erosion for the region to explore whether human land use at different points in the past was significant enough to initiate earth systems feedbacks at a regional scale. The expansion of this approach to a pan-tropical level is also anticipated. If successful, this would represent the successful conclusion of the project and provide an important methodological framework for the integration of archaeological and historical datasets into discussions of earth systems science and changing human influences on our planet.