Collaborative Research: Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia and Mid-Holocene Environmental Changes

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With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr Joy McCorriston (The Ohio State University), Dr. Eric Oches (University of South Florida), and their colleagues and students will conduct three seasons of field research in the Hadramawt region of southern Yemen in order to investigate environmental and cultural impacts of the middle-Holocene (ca. 5,000 years ago) monsoon decline and accompanying aridification. Changing middle-Holocene climatic patterns in southern Arabia forced people in the early stages of developing agricultural subsistence economies to adapt their cultivation technologies, water management practices, and herding strategies to an increasingly arid landscape. Specific research objectives include: (1) reconstruct human economic behaviors in the southern Arabian uplands during the wetter early- to middle-Holocene, (2) provide wider regional context for high-resolution archaeological and palaeoecological records by comparing sequences from different highland areas (Wadi Sana and Wadi Idim), and (3) develop high-resolution chronology for the archaeological and sedimentary record of environmental changes associated with the middle-Holocene climatological shift in precipitation. The interdisciplinary team headed by an archaeologist (McCorriston), geologist (Oches), and Yemeni ethnographer (Bin .Aqil) will reconstruct the archaeological record of human behavior in the context of sedimentary and fossil records of vegetation, hydrology, and climate. Archaeological excavations will focus on rock-shelters, pit-house dwellings, and water management structures that have been identified in previous fieldwork and are dated by radiocarbon and artifact typology between ca. 9,000 - 5,000 (calendar) years ago. The team will conduct research and train interdisciplinary students through archaeological survey and excavation, ethnoarchaeology, artifact analysis, paleovegetation studies, sedimentological analysis, and paleohydrological reconstruction. Efforts will be made to include Yemeni researchers and students in field studies in order to provide archaeological and geological training. Results of the study will be used to develop conceptual and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) models to explain the cultural and environmental factors involved in the adoption of agriculture in the changing middle-Holocene paleoenvironments of southern Arabia and to contribute toward paleoenvironmental knowledge of a little-known region. The research areas in southern Yemen, with their good preservation of all-but abandoned landscapes once shaped by early Holocene human and environmental processes, provide an unparalleled context to resolve Arabia's role in the spread of early agriculture and its record of past climate and environmental changes.