Full text
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| Author(s): |
Cassiana Purcino Perez
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Biociências (IBIOC/SB) |
| Defense date: | 2009-04-16 |
| Examining board members: |
Walter Alves Neves;
Augusto Sarreiro Auler;
Mario de Vivo
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| Advisor: | Walter Alves Neves |
| Abstract | |
Lagoa Santa region in Minas Gerais plays an important role in Brazilian paleontological and archaeological studies. The understanding of regional landscape evolution during the Holocene is crucial for advancing issues raised 150 years ago by Peter Lund in the region. Despite decades of research on quaternary environmental changes, an understanding of the establishment of todays landscape and its evolution during the past 10,000 years has been hampered by the lack of accurate chronological control and temporal resolution in paleoenvironmental studies. A paleoecological reconstruction for the Lagoa Santa region is key to understand the development and the organization of the first hunter-gathered societies of the continent. Aiming at filling up this gap, the main objective of this study is to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental changes in Lagoa Santa region during the Holocene based on the paleoecology of mammal community of two fossiliferous assemblages. In addition, the pre-burial and post-depositional taphonomic processes associated with the two assemblages were assessed in order to understand the influence of these two variables in the interpretation of the past environment. This study examines the fossil material exhumed from a paleontological site (Gruta Cuvieri) and an archaeological site (Lapa do Santo), both found within the Lagoa Santa region. The paleoenvironmental reconstruction was based on the variation of relative abundance of the main mammals taxa found at both sites, using analytical tools such as NISP (number of identifiable specimen) and MNI (minimum number of individuals). The pre-burial taphonomic processes were analyzed qualitatively, while the postdepositional taphonomic processes were analyzed quantitatively based on abundance of whole skeletal elements (WSE) relative to NISP, for each taxon. The results show that taphonomic processes responsible for site formation did not affect the paleoenvironmental analyzes, and that the relative abundance of NISP is directly affected by the degree of bone fragmentation, 5 thus, suggesting NISP to be a poor analytical tool for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. On the other hand, the analysis of the relative abundance variation based on MNI was not affected by the degree of bone fragmentation. These results suggest that the MNI is more reliable analytical too for paleoenvironmental reconstruction based on the variation of abundance of mammal fossils. Finally, the paleoenvironmental analysis based on MNI revealed a homogeneous climate in the region during the Early and Middle Holocene, and moisture increase during Late Holocene. (AU) | |