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

现在五分之四的美国人居住在城市。随着城市人口的不断增长，城市面临着以健康和可持续的方式养活居民的新挑战。最近解决这个问题的一个办法是城市农业，它在为城市居民提供健康农产品的同时，还为城市地区带来了“绿色”。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多代人的长期实施。考古学领域完全有能力为这项工作做出贡献，因为考古学家可以记录古代可持续社区所使用的成功策略。一些文明几个世纪以来一直依靠城市农业养活自己，现代社会开始认识到，它可以从这些古代社会中学到很多关于长期可持续性的知识。墨西哥和中美洲的玛雅文明就是这样一种文明，它是密歇根大学考古学家切尔西·费舍尔 (Chelsea Fisher) 对“定居点内或“社区”农业起源的研究的主题。许多玛雅城市是分散的或“无核”的，结构密度低：它们在定居点中保留着开放的空间；证据表明其中一些空间用于集约化的城市农业。尽管考古学家认识到许多后期时期（约 250-900 年）的大型玛雅城市CE）以城市农业为生，目前尚不完全了解（1）这些可持续战略最初是如何发展的，或者（2）这些战略如何在个体家庭和社区层面实际发挥作用，在这些问题得到解答之前，现代社会可以从古代玛雅例子中学习的潜力仍然不充分。费舍尔研究玛雅城市农业起源的策略是将其剥离到基础：研究一个小社区，查考伊，它是在玛雅人第一次出现时定居的。查考伊位于墨西哥尤卡坦州，拥有独特的条件，可以对早期（约公元前 250 年至公元 250 年）玛雅房屋进行全面考古探索，并对周围景观进行土地利用改造。费舍尔将对查考伊的九个房屋群进行挖掘，同时对房屋之间和周围区域的农业特征和土地利用模式（例如梯田、护堤、水库）进行严格调查。费舍尔将利用在察考伊收集的考古数据，分析多代察考伊家庭之间的互动以及他们对景观的投资，探索察考伊作为农业社区的发展。费舍尔在察考伊的研究对于玛雅考古领域和现代社区可持续性问题都很重要，同时也提供了详细的资料。有关各个家庭如何管理社区农业物流的信息，这些见解将提高考古学提供长期数据的能力，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。

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.