Long Term Development of Economic Landscapes in an Island Context

农业发展是一个不断累积的过程，发生在动态的社会和生态环境中。由于农业实践改变了环境，发展的集体影响改变了下一代农民的生产环境。在热带地区，粮食生产战略改变了环境，创造了具有重要经济意义的物种和微环境，使人们能够扩大生产和创新新技术。这种环境变化存在于更广泛的社会关系中，通常是那些与权力谈判的社会关系。社会关系通过影响劳动力动员和景观利用的性质来影响农业发展的进程。长期以来，学者们提出了一个令人信服的案例，即波利尼西亚经济的变化是由精英对盈余的需求所驱动的，他们经常利用有利但受限制的生态条件，但在小规模的政治实体中缺乏对这种过程进行建模的证据。农业发展的考古调查提供了不同地点和时间使用的耕作策略的信息，与理解社会和环境因素的作用有关。这些数据具有相当的时间深度，可以支持对社会、经济和生理过程随时间的复杂相互作用的研究。在这一更广泛的背景下，Seth Quintus博士和他的共同调查人员将进行研究，研究塔乌岛美属萨摩亚经济景观的发展。这项研究将通过收集最近在该岛内陆高地发现的田野和定居系统的数据来进行。传统的考古发掘和遥感方法将使研究小组了解人类活动的分布，这将有助于确定人口内部的社会差异。考古调查的结果将与可能影响生产者决定的当地土壤肥力变化和景观演变的评估进行比较。木材木炭组合的分类分析将用于研究树木种植在生产系统中的作用，这是太平洋生产系统中一个重要但尚未得到充分了解的组成部分。这些方法将提供对社会和环境耦合过程的综合考察，这些过程创造了像塔乌岛这样的小岛屿景观。社会生态动态帮助创造了我们今天所看到的环境，这些环境仍然是岛屿居民生产的重点。了解这些环境是如何在被认为是理想模式系统的孤岛上创造出来的，对于制定能够解决当今粮食安全和促进粮食主权问题的生产战略至关重要。

Agricultural development is a cumulative process that occurs within dynamic social and ecological contexts. Because agricultural practices modify the environment, the collective impact of development changes the contexts of production for the next generation of farmers. In the tropics, food-production strategies have transformed the environment to create a mosaic of economically important species and microenvironments, which have allowed populations to extend production and innovate new techniques. Such environmental changes reside within wider social relationships, often those that negotiate power. Social relations impact the course of agricultural development by influencing the nature of labor mobilization and the use of landscapes. Scholars have long made a compelling case that change in Polynesian economies was motivated by elite demands for surplus, often taking advantage of favorable but circumscribed ecological conditions, but the evidence to model such processes are lacking in small scale political entities. Archaeological investigations of agricultural development provide information on cultivation strategies used in different places and times, relevant for understanding the role of social and environmental factors. These data have considerable temporal depth to support an examination of the complex interplay of social, economic, and physiological processes over time. Within this broader context, Dr. Seth Quintus and his co-investigators will undertake research to study the development of economic landscapes on Ta'u Island American Samoa. This research will be conducted by collecting data from a field and settlement system recently discovered in the interior uplands of the island. Traditional archaeological excavation and remote sensing methods will allow the team to understand the distribution of human activities, which will aid in identifying social differences within the population. The results of archaeological survey will be compared with an assessment of local variation in soil fertility and landscape evolution that might have affected the decisions of producers. Taxonomic analysis of wood charcoal assemblages will be used to investigate the role of tree-cropping in the production system, an important but not well understood component of Pacific production systems. These methods will provide an integrated examination of the coupled social and environmental processes that have created small island landscapes such as the one found on Ta'u. Socio-ecological dynamics helped to create the environments that we see today, which continue to be the focus of production for island residents. Understanding how these environments were created on isolated islands, which are considered ideal model systems, is fundamental to developing production strategies that can address concerns regarding food security and the promotion of food sovereignty today.