CAREER: Human adaptations to changing environments: Supporting student education and research in anthropological isotopic methodologies

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Dr. Rhonda Quinn, of Seton Hall University (SHU), will investigate how past human groups adapted to resource availability and environmental change caused by global climate perturbations. Archaeology and paleoanthropology offer a deep time perspective on the impact of climatic and environmental change on human systems and can be used to elucidate modern human-environment interactions. Dr. Quinn employs stable isotopic analysis to characterize past human diet and mobility in the context of environmental conditions and will use her research program to engage high school, undergraduate, and beginning graduate students with hands-on research and training experiences. With NSF CAREER support, Dr. Quinn will provide a laboratory-based, three-week summer short course for undergraduate and/or beginning graduate students across disciplines. Students will be drawn from SHU, a primarily undergraduate teaching school serving a diverse socio-economic and cultural student population, and other area and/or collaborative institutions. Two annual undergraduate laboratory assistantships will provide further opportunities for student research project development. This program will also incorporate area high school students into summer and yearly laboratory research projects from historically underrepresented populations through Project SEED (American Chemical Society's summer research program for economically disadvantaged young people) and SHU's Experiential Learning Initiative with North Star Academy in Newark, NJ. These activities will provide student researchers with a solid foundation for understanding and critically evaluating stable isotopic data through a lens of anthropological inquiry. A portion of NSF CAREER funding will provide enhanced facilities in Dr. Quinn's laboratory to increase research productivity and educational infrastructure and enrich the collaborative research environment at SHU. Dr. Quinn will incorporate students into her three interrelated research areas: environments of human evolution, environmental influences of human diet and mobility, and stable isotopic actualistic studies. The first set of projects will examine environmental contexts of early human ancestors in order to better understand what local and global environmental factors influenced morphological and behavioral changes in the human lineage. Environmental selective pressures and habitat preferences are reconstructed by employing stable isotopic analyses of paleosols and other geological materials to infer past vegetation communities and environmental conditions at archaeological and paleoanthropological sites spanning 4-1 Ma in the Turkana Basin, Kenya. The second area explores how human diet and mobility patterns have changed with environmental and climatic perturbations, with an emphasis on Holocene coastal and island archaeological sites. Studies of prehistoric human diet change and mobility are focused on Pacific Islands and coastal Florida during times of climatically induced ecosystem collapse and employ stable isotopes of human and faunal skeletal materials. The third area is concerned with increasing stable isotopic methodological resolution with actualistic studies of modern ecosystems. These include isotopically characterizing modern water, soil, plant and animal samples for building interpretative frameworks in the vicinity of archaeological and paleoanthropological sites and also from analogous environments. Samples collected during Dr. Quinn's prior fieldwork will be utilized for student-involved, laboratory-based research projects.