US-Ethiopia Planning Visit: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Late Holocene Human-Environment Relationships in Aksum, N. Ethiopia

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This planning visit award will support Dr. Magaly Koch and Dr. Michael DiBlasi of Boston University to develop, with collaborators Mulugeta Haile Mariam of the Geological Survey of Ethiopia, Jan Nyssen of Mekelle University, and Rudolfo Fattovich of the Orientale University of Naples, Italy, a project to reconstruct the environmental history and landscape ecology of the core area of the Aksumite Empire in northern Ethiopia. During the period 800 BC to AD 900, powerful chiefdoms, kingdoms, and an expansive, territorial state - Aksum - arose in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. From ca. AD 100 to 650 (the major period of Aksum's growth) the environment of Tigray supported a sophisticated urban culture with a dense regional population. Today, however, Tigray is considered one of Ethiopia's most environmentally degraded regions, and is prone to severe erosion, droughts, and famine. The extent to which millennia of human land use activities played a role in environmental change in this region remains largely unanswered. The planning visit will be used to develop a larger project that uses evidence from geomorphology, sedimentology, and archaeology to determine how environmental and cultural factors influenced landscape transformations in northern Tigray during the late Holocene and how those transformations influenced human activities and cultural development. This knowledge will aid in understanding both the long-term impact of certain land use patterns that might occur across the world, as well as the current environmental problems and strategies to mitigate them in the highlands of Tigray.Collaboration with the University of Mekelle (Tigray) and the Geological Survey of Ethiopia will develop new linkages with Ethiopian scientists, provide field and laboratory training for graduate students and professionals from each institution, and give U.S. students international experience by participating in collaborative research abroad. This award is co-funded by NSF's Geography and Regional Science Program.