Environment as agent and actor in Iron Age, Medieval, and Early Modern Ulster

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，蒂娜·瑟斯顿博士将与美国和英国的同事一起，在北爱尔兰的阿马郡和蒂龙郡进行为期三年的实地考察，试图了解在过去两千年里，阿尔斯特前政体中，长期气候和环境变化是如何与不断变化的政治组织和生计相互作用的。该项目在理论上和地理上都提出了一个合理的主张，即北爱尔兰的研究不仅是北极，因为它与加拿大的拉布拉多处于同一纬度，更重要的是，阿尔斯特的历史对全球人类生态动力学的一般理论有很大贡献。阿尔斯特，现在大致包括现代北爱尔兰，通过铁器时代的“阿尔斯特循环”传奇故事首次进入书面记录，而后来的历史编年史描述了连续的新影响浪潮：公元5世纪的基督教化，9世纪的维京殖民，12世纪的盎格鲁-诺曼入侵，以及16 -17世纪的英国阿尔斯特种植园。因此，阿尔斯特经历了一系列外部强加的政治政权，除了本土统治者，每个人都有不同的经济和政治目标，以不同的方式影响当地人口。即使政治条件发生了变化，许多气候变化的影响也很明显，其影响往往会使社会经济体系过时，推动各个部门的变革，并可能最终导致对外部力量的保护或脆弱性。本研究认为，公元300年至1700年间酋长领地、王国和帝国的政治发展是加强经济、指导政策和治理的工具化自然条件，但同样的条件也导致许多人动摇、分裂和重组。虽然研究小组确实研究了精英文化与-à-vis生态变化的关系，但主要目标是阐明这些变化如何影响受这些政权统治的普通人，以及他们如何应对税收、兵役和其他义务的要求。调查人员还寻求个人和社区如何在日常生活中应对气候和环境变化的数据，通过改变生计做法，制定土地和动物管理战略，以及实施新想法。研究小组指出，过去的研究过于关注书面文字，这是一种有限的策略，因为中世纪和早期现代作家经常根据自己或赞助人的观点来偏见他们的作品，扭曲或忽视了统治和主体性的许多方面。它们也没能描述很多普通人的日常生活。虽然考古工作通常可以解决文本记录中的这种空白，但在爱尔兰，由于牧场覆盖的土地占主导地位，大多数考古遗址都变得“看不见”，使得在犁地中进行通常简单类型的考古侦察成为不可能。例如，在整个爱尔兰，只有219个遗址可以可靠地追溯到铁器时代，而估计有数万个或更多。因此，重点是“可见”的地上遗址，如与统治者或上层阶级有关的城堡和堡垒。研究小组认为，在许多情况下，对单个地点的研究并不能回答有关长期区域经济和社会政治变化的问题；通过研究作为变化或停滞指标的变化或持续的“区域定居模式”，可以更好地回答这些问题，但如果不实施新的战略，这种模式就无法为爱尔兰重建。PI的职业生涯一直专注于开发解决此类问题的勘探方法，并在2008-2009年在Armagh的初步项目中取得了优异的成果。该项目现在将扩展到最初设想的完整地理/时间范围，在Armagh和Tyrone的两个20平方公里的调查区块，在那里可以很好地监测社会生态关系的序列。2011-2013年，该小组将开展全覆盖调查，使用地面地球化学调查、IFSAR遥感和机载高光谱分析，所有非侵入性遥感方法都能很好地应对北爱尔兰能见度低的情况，以建立一个数据库，通过该数据库可以了解定居点和人口动态，这是解释社会和政治变化之前的必要步骤。然后对站点进行测试，AMS日期，并对站点类型和使用进行特征描述。与此同时，当地的古环境研究将进行，以建立直接围绕研究社区的条件，并补充现有的大规模爱尔兰气候和环境数据。该项目的最终目标是通过使用民族历史方法和新颖的现场策略来寻找普通人缺失的记录，从而弥补对精英文化的历史和考古偏见。动态的社会生态景观既是文化进程的代表，也是文化进程的印记。气候学者认为，当前全球问题的解决部分在于与过去对环境动荡的反应进行比较研究。政府不可能通过立法改变所有的行为和态度；普通人在应对不断变化的环境中发挥着至关重要的作用。我们的研究强调了连续统治政权与普通人对变革的实际管理之间的相互作用，特别是在与今天普遍存在的后殖民问题高度相关的殖民条件下。该研究将北爱尔兰的过去作为一个重要的研究案例，表明气候、国家、帝国以及“统治者”和“被统治者”之间的相互依存之间存在联系，以应对构成地球上人类生活基础的不平衡。

With NSF support, Dr. Tina Thurston, with US and UK colleagues, will conduct three years of fieldwork in County Armagh and County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, seeking to understand how long-term climate and environmental change interacted with changing political organization and livelihood during the last two millennia in the former polity of Ulster. The project makes a sound claim, both theoretically and geographically, that research in Northern Ireland is not only Arctic by being at the same latitude as Labrador, Canada but, more importantly, that the history of Ulster has much to contribute to a general theory of global human ecodynamics. Ulster, now roughly comprising modern Northern Ireland, first enters the written record via the Iron Age "Ulster Cycle" sagas, while later historic chronicles describe successive waves of new influences: 5th century AD Christianization, 9th century Viking colonization, 12th century Anglo-Norman invasion, and the English Plantation of Ulster in the 16th -17th centuries. Ulster thus experienced a succession of externally imposed political regimes, in addition to homegrown rulers, each with different economic and political goals, impacting local populations in different ways. Even as political conditions shifted, many climate change effects are also apparent, with impacts that often left socioeconomic systems obsolete, propelled change in every sector, and perhaps ultimately contributed to protection from or vulnerability to external powers. This study views the political development of chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires between AD 300 - 1700 as instrumentalizing natural conditions to strengthen economies, guide policy, and govern, yet the same conditions also led many to falter, fragment, and reorganize. While the research team does examine elite culture vis-à-vis ecological change, the primary goal is elucidating how such changes impacted the ordinary people subject to these regimes, and how they navigated demands for taxes, military service, and other obligations. The investigators also seek data on how individuals and communities dealt with climate and environmental change in their daily lives, by altering livelihood practices, strategizing land and animal management, and implementing new ideas.The research team points out that past studies have focused too much on the written word, a limited strategy, as Medieval and Early Modern writers frequently biased their work according to their own or their patrons' perspectives, distorting or ignoring many aspects of both rulership and subjecthood. They also fail to describe much about the daily lives of ordinary people. While archaeological work could normally resolve such gaps in textual records, in Ireland most archaeological sites are rendered "invisible" by the predominance of pasture-covered land, making normally simple types of archaeological reconnaissance, carried out in plowed fields, impossible. Only 219 sites reliably dated to the Iron Age, for example, are recorded for all Ireland, out of an estimated number in the tens of thousands or more. The focus has thus been on "visible" above-ground sites, such as castles and forts, associated with rulers or the upper class. The team makes that case that in many contexts, studies of single sites do not answer questions about long-term regional economic and sociopolitical change; these are better answered by study of shifting or persistent "regional settlement patterns" as indicators of change or stasis, but such patterns cannot be reconstructed for Ireland without implementing new strategies. The PI's career has focused on developing prospection methods to resolve such problems, yielding excellent results in a 2008-2009 preliminary project in Armagh. The project will now expand to the full geographic/temporal extent originally envisioned, in two 20 km2 survey blocks in Armagh and Tyrone, where sequences of socioecological relationships can be well monitored. In 2011-2013 the team will carry out full coverage survey, using ground-based geochemical survey, IFSAR remote sensing, and airborne hyperspectral analysis, all non-invasive, remote sensing methods that perform well with Northern Ireland's impeded visibility, to establish a database from which settlement and population dynamics can be understood, a necessary step before social and political changes can be interpreted. Sites will then be tested, AMS dated, and characterized for site type and usage. Simultaneously, local paleoenvironmental studies will be conducted to establish conditions directly surrounding studied communities, complimentary with extant large-scale Irish climate and environmental data. The project's ultimate goal is to compensate for historical and archaeological biases toward elite culture by using ethnohistoric approaches and novel field strategies to find the missing record of ordinary people. The dynamic socioecological landscape is both a proxy for and impress of cultural processes. Climate scholars argue that resolution of current global problems lies partly in comparative study with past responses to environmental turbulence. Governments cannot legislate all behavioral and attitude changes; ordinary people play crucial roles in coping with changing milieus. Our study emphasizes interplay between successive rulership regimes and ordinary people's practical management of change, especially under colonial conditions highly relevant to pervasive postcolonial problems today. The research offers Northern Ireland's past as an important case study suggesting links between climate, state, empire, and the interdependence between "rulers" and "ruled" in coping with the disequilibrium that forms the substrate for human life on earth.