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.

现在五分之四的美国人住在城市里。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，为城市居民提供了健康的农产品。尽管城市农场和花园已经在美国几十个城市涌现，但其最终的成功取决于它在几代人的长期实施。考古学领域有能力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。几个世纪以来，一些文明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那里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“内部定居”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；有证据表明，其中一些空间被用于集约化城市农业。虽然考古学家认识到，玛雅后期（约公元250-900年）的许多大城市都是靠城市农业养活自己的，但还不能完全理解：(1)这些可持续发展的战略是如何发展起来的，或者(2)这些战略在个体家庭和社区层面上是如何发挥作用的。在这些问题得到解答之前，现代社会从古玛雅人身上学习的潜力仍然没有得到充分的开发。费雪调查玛雅城市农业起源的策略是将其分解为最基本的：研究一个小社区，察考伊尔，在玛雅人第一次学习如何成为农民的时候，这个社区就定居下来了。Tzacauil位于墨西哥Yucatán州，拥有独特的条件，可以对早期（约公元前250年-公元250年）玛雅房屋和周围景观的土地使用变化进行全面的考古探索。Fisher将在Tzacauil的九个房屋群进行挖掘，同时对房屋之间和周围地区的农业特征和土地使用模式（例如梯田、护堤、水库）进行严格调查。利用在察考伊尔收集的考古数据，费舍尔将分析察考伊尔家族的几代人是如何相互作用的，以及他们与日益发展的农业景观之间的关系。通过比较家庭之间的互动以及他们对景观的投资，Fisher将探索Tzacauil作为一个农业社区的发展。这项研究对玛雅考古领域和现代社区可持续性问题都很重要。Fisher在Tzacauil的研究澄清了玛雅地区早期定居和农业的起源，同时也提供了关于个体家庭如何管理社区农业物流的详细信息。这些见解将增加考古学提供长期数据的能力，这些数据可能对今天有兴趣促进社区可持续发展和城市农业的城市有指导意义。