Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Household and Community Arrangement in a Traditional Society

博士论文改进奖：传统社会中的家庭和社区安排

• 批准号: 1659924
• 负责人: Joyce Marcus
• 金额: $ 2.04万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-12-01 至 2017-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1659924&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Improvement; Award; Household

Four out of five Americans now live in cities. As urban populations continue to grow, cities face new challenges to feed their residents in healthy and sustainable ways. One recent solution to this issue has been urban agriculture, which simultaneously "greens" blighted urban areas while making healthy produce accessible to city-dwellers. Though urban farms and gardens have sprung up in dozens of American cities, its ultimate success depends on its long-term implementation over multiple generations. The field of archaeology is well positioned to contribute to this effort because archaeologists can document the successful strategies used by ancient sustainable communities. Some civilizations fed themselves with urban agriculture for centuries, and modern society is beginning to recognize that it can learn a lot about long-term sustainability from those ancient societies. One such civilization, the Maya of Mexico and Central America, is the subject of University of Michigan archaeologist Chelsea Fisher's research into the origins of "intra-settlement or "community" agriculture. Many Maya cities are dispersed or "non-nucleated" with low density of structures: they maintained open spaces in their settlements; evidence suggests that some of these spaces were used for intensive urban agriculture. Though archaeologists recognize that many huge Maya cities of later time periods (ca. 250-900 CE) fed themselves with urban agriculture, it is not fully understood (1) how those sustainable strategies developed in the first place, or (2) how those strategies actually worked at the level of individual households and communities. Until those questions are answered, the potential for what modern society can learn from the ancient Maya example remains underdeveloped.Fisher's strategy for investigating the origins of Maya urban agriculture is to strip it down to the basics: to study a small community, Tzacauil, that was settled right at the time that the Maya were first learning how to be farmers. Tzacauil, located in the Mexican state of Yucatán, has unique conditions that allow for full archaeological exploration of early (ca. 250 BCE - 250 CE) Maya houses and land-use modifications in the surrounding landscape. Fisher will conduct excavations at nine house groups at Tzacauil in conjunction with rigorous investigation of agricultural features and land-use patterns (e.g., terraces, berms, reservoirs) in the areas between and around houses. Using the archaeological data collected at Tzacauil, Fisher will analyze how multiple generations of Tzacauil families interacted with each other and with their increasingly agricultural landscape. By comparing households' interactions alongside their investments in the landscape, Fisher will explore the development of Tzacauil as an agricultural community. This research is important both for the field of Maya archaeology and for issues of modern community sustainability. Fisher's research at Tzacauil clarifies the early origins of settlement and agriculture in the Maya area, while also providing fine-grained information about how individual households managed the logistics of community agriculture. These insights stand to increase archaeology's ability to contribute long-term data that are potentially instructive for cities interested in promoting community-based sustainability and urban agriculture today.

五分之四的美国人现在住在城市里。随着城市人口的持续增长，城市面临着以健康和可持续的方式为居民提供食物的新挑战。最近解决这个问题的一个办法是城市农业，它在“绿化”城市地区的同时，使城市居民能够获得健康的农产品。尽管城市农场和花园在美国数十个城市如雨后春笋般涌现，但其最终成功取决于其在多代人中的长期实施。考古学领域很好地为这一努力做出贡献，因为考古学家可以记录古代可持续社区使用的成功策略。一些文明靠城市农业养活了自己几个世纪，现代社会开始认识到，它可以从这些古代社会学到很多关于长期可持续性的东西。其中一个文明，墨西哥和中美洲的玛雅文明，是密歇根大学考古学家切尔西·费舍尔研究“定居点内或社区”农业起源的主题。许多玛雅城市是分散的或“无核”的，结构密度低：他们在定居点保持开放空间;证据表明，其中一些空间用于密集的城市农业。虽然考古学家认识到，许多巨大的玛雅城市的后期时期（约。公元250-900年）以城市农业为生，但人们并不完全理解（1）这些可持续战略最初是如何发展的，或者（2）这些战略如何在单个家庭和社区层面上实际发挥作用。在这些问题得到解答之前，现代社会可以从古代玛雅人的例子中学到什么的潜力仍然没有得到充分开发。费舍尔调查玛雅城市农业起源的策略是将其分解到最基本的东西：研究一个小社区，Tzacauil，在玛雅人第一次学习如何成为农民的时候就定居下来了。Tzacauil位于墨西哥尤卡坦州，具有独特的条件，允许对早期（约1000年）进行全面的考古探索。公元前250年-公元250年）玛雅房屋和周围景观的土地使用修改。费舍尔将在Tzacauil的九个房屋群进行挖掘，同时对农业特征和土地使用模式进行严格调查（例如，梯田、护堤、水库）。利用在Tzacauil收集的考古数据，费舍尔将分析多代Tzacauil家庭如何相互作用，以及他们日益增长的农业景观。通过比较家庭的互动以及他们在景观中的投资，费舍尔将探索Tzacauil作为一个农业社区的发展。这项研究对于玛雅考古学领域和现代社区可持续性问题都很重要。费舍尔在Tzacauil的研究澄清了玛雅地区定居和农业的早期起源，同时也提供了有关单个家庭如何管理社区农业物流的精细信息。这些见解将提高考古学贡献长期数据的能力，这些数据对当今有兴趣促进基于社区的可持续发展和城市农业的城市具有潜在的指导意义。