CAREER: Exploring Agriculture, the Environment, and Social Change: Evidence from the Ancient Near East

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Alexia Smith will establish a long-term regional archaeobotanical study that uses plant data to examine the dynamics of agriculture, environment, climate change, and the development and collapse of early chiefdoms, state level societies, and empires across Southwest Asia from the Ubaid period to the Iron Age (6th millennium BC-550 BC). To date, archaeobotany, the study of human interactions with plants in antiquity, has been underutilized in the study of early social complexity, despite having much to offer. Plant remains from six sites spanning an environmentally diverse region will be studied: Tell Qarqur, Tell Zeidan, and Tell Leilan, in Syria; Çadýr Höyük and Kenan Tepe in Turkey, and Areni-1 in Armenia. Once combined, the data will provide valuable information on the ways in which social organization, environment, and climate affected agricultural decision making in the past. Archaeobotanical samples will be collected during summer field seasons and analyzed at the University of Connecticut during the academic year. This research will be integrated with education to increase the number of professional archaeobotanists; increase the use of archaeobotany in future excavations; enhance public knowledge of the methods that archaeologists use in an effort to deepen understanding of the importance and fragility of archaeological resources; and improve public awareness of archaeological ethics and the cultural history of the Middle East. The intellectual merits of this project underscore the potential of archaeobotany to address broad social questions and expand knowledge on the human response to environment and climate change in the past. Data from Tell Zeidan and Kenan Tepe will allow the link between food production and incipient social complexity to be investigated. Data from Tell Leilan will contribute to the debate concerning the role of climate change in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. Çadýr Höyük and Tell Qarqur yield long sequences of social flux and food production. The remains from Areni-1 provide information on the domestication of walnut, apricot, almond, and grape. Combined, the data will expose regional patterning in food production across an environmentally diverse landscape, allowing the stability of early states to be examined from a new perspective. The broader impacts of this proposal include: 1) enhanced collaboration with museums, K-12 educators, education specialists, and scholars at numerous universities within the US as well as scholars at universities, museum, and scientific institutes overseas; 2) training and research opportunities in archaeobotany for graduate and undergraduate students at UConn and overseas; 3) enhanced education in archaeological ethics and the range of methods and theories used to generate and evaluate archaeological data for non-Anthropology undergraduates, trainee K-12 science teachers, and members of the public participating in the State of Connecticut's Museum of Natural History outreach program for adults and children; 4) broadening the public's perspectives on the complex relationships between climate, food production, and society, as well as the cultural history of the Middle East; and 5) public access to the data and teaching materials generated via Open Context and the Society for American Archaeology's website.