Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Drought, Water And Sustainable Cultural Practices

面对日益增长的需求和气候变化，研究人员、公众和政府机构越来越关注社会如何可持续地管理宝贵的自然资源，如水。考古学可以让我们了解过去的社区是如何面对类似问题的。在Christopher Roos博士的指导下，Michael Aiuvalasit将调查史前干旱如何影响新墨西哥州Jemez山脉祖先普韦布洛人社区的长期可持续性。这项研究是及时的，因为美国西南部正在经历一场干旱，其规模和严重程度上一次出现在史前普韦布洛人祖先的干旱是在15世纪和16世纪。通过将现有的考古数据集和高分辨率古气候数据与新的低影响的史前蓄水特征数据恢复技术相结合，本研究将为社区如何适应气候变化提供长期视角。探索水、气候和文化之间关系的科学和历史课程将为该地区印第安人后裔社区的学生开发。这项研究将作为一个例子，说明考古学家如何通过承认最终推动社区对气候变化的恢复力（或脆弱性）的社会动态，而不仅仅是在气候变化和文化变化之间建立简单的因果关系。邻近的Jemez和Pajarito高原在Jemez山脉为这次调查提供了一个理想的环境。虽然这些地区有着相似的自然环境、气候历史和史前适应性，但在15世纪和16世纪的干旱期间，这些地区的文化历史出现了分歧。帕加里托高原的大型社区被遗弃，而杰梅斯高原的社区一直存在，直到17世纪西班牙人迁移了当地人口。干旱经常被认为是帕加里托被遗弃的原因之一，但很少有人考虑到这是如何发生的，或者为什么杰梅斯高原的社区能在类似的条件下坚持下来。储水设施被认为是用来储存生活用水的水库，在这两个地区的大型村庄遗址都发现了。这些特性将被直接测试，以重建这些特性的使用寿命历史，这将作为理解社区如何采取集体行动来解决资源管理问题的代理。利用考古地质学、水文地质学和来自经济模型的预测，将比较这些地区之间社区对干旱的反应。社区水预算模型和基于树木年轮的干旱周期重建将比较这些特征何时以及如何发挥作用，以确定这些特征对总体社区水预算的贡献，以及这些地区之间的社区对干旱的反应是否存在差异。正式的成本效益分析将用于模拟参与水资源集体管理的回报在干旱之前、期间或之后是否不同。这项研究有可能利用与社会科学家评估现代社区对气候变化的脆弱性类似的方法来评估气候变化、资源管理和社区可持续性之间的关系。

Researchers, the public, and governing agencies are increasingly concerned about how societies will sustainably manage precious natural resources, such as water, in the face of both increasing demands and climate change. Archaeology can provide insights into how communities confronted similar problems in the past. Under the direction of Dr. Christopher Roos, Michael Aiuvalasit will investigate how prehistoric droughts impacted the long-term sustainability of Ancestral Puebloan communities in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. This study is timely because the American Southwest is experiencing a drought of a magnitude and severity last seen by prehistoric Ancestral Puebloans in the 15th and 16th centuries. By integrating existing archaeological datasets and high resolution paleoclimatic data with new low-impact data recovery techniques at prehistoric water storage features, this study will provide a long-term perspective on how communities adapt to climate change. Science and history curriculum exploring the relationship between water, climate, and culture will be developed for students in descendant Native American communities in the region.This study will serve as an example for how archaeologists can move beyond making simple causal links between changes in climate and culture by acknowledging the social dynamics that ultimately drive community resilience (or vulnerability) to climate change. The adjacent Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus in the Jemez Mountains provide an ideal context for this investigation. While these regions share similar physical contexts, climate histories, and prehistoric adaptations the cultural histories of these regions diverged during droughts in the 15th and 16th centuries. Large communities of the Pajarito Plateau were abandoned, while those of the Jemez Plateau persisted until the Spanish removed local populations in the 17th century. Drought has often been evoked as a cause for the abandonment of the Pajarito, but little consideration has been given to how this happened, or why communities of the Jemez Plateau persevered through analogous conditions. Water storage features, thought to be reservoirs used to hold domestic water, are found at large village sites in both regions. These features will be directly tested to reconstruct the use-life histories of these features, which will then serve as a proxy for understanding how communities took collective action to solve resource management problems. Using archaeological geology, hydrogeology, and predications derived from economic modeling, the responses to droughts by communities between these regions will be compared. Models of community water budgets and tree-ring based reconstructions of drought periodicities will be compared to when and how these features functioned to establish the contributions these features to overall community water budgets, and whether or not there were differences in communal responses to droughts between these regions. Formal cost-benefit analyses will be used to model whether the payoffs for participating in collective management of water were different before, during, or after droughts. This study has the potential to assess the relationship between climate change, resource management, and community sustainability using similar approaches to those used by social scientists who evaluate the vulnerability of modern communities to climate change.