The Affect Of Environmental Variation On Social Organization

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Drs. Thomas Pluckhahn (University of South Florida) and Victor Thompson (University of Georgia) will undertake research regarding the manner in which common property regimes shift over time in relation to changes in environmental and socio-political contexts. The longstanding notion that common property resources are effectively managed only through state control or private property regimes has been refuted time and again by anthropological and historical case studies demonstrating how social groups ranging from small communities to nation-states have devised effective systems of resource management, some of which endure for long periods of time. However, the manner in which common property institutions develop and change over time is poorly understood. As a result, researchers also lack the ability to reliably predict how existing regimes may change with respect to future perturbations in natural and social environments.Drs. Pluckhahn and Thompson, along with a team of graduate students and a post-doctoral scholar, will study changes in sea tenure - the collectively-managed use rights to fisheries - among the native societies of the Tampa Bay estuary during the late Holocene, from around AD 250 to 1650. Spanish accounts from the end of this time range describe a fractured socio-political landscape comprised of warring, territorially-based chiefdoms, while archaeological evidence from the earlier range of the time frame suggests a more dispersed population with less social stratification and little inter-group conflict. The research tests the hypothesis that this transformation was the result of changes in sea tenure occurring in conjunction with shifts in the natural and social environments, through a program of archaeological and paleoecological testing. For the reconstruction of ancient systems of sea tenure, the research employs isotopic studies of oyster shells in concert with the analysis of the relative abundance of shellfish species with varying salinity tolerances, to model habitat of collection. To reconstruct the local and regional manifestations of global shifts in climate, the researchers will collect pollen and sediments from wetlands adjacent to archaeological sites. Changes in socio-political organization will be identified through a program of archaeological testing and shallow geophysics at mound and village complexes. Temporal control is provided by a rigorous program of radiocarbon dating. This interdisciplinary dataset will contribute to a better understanding of how common property resource management systems may be remade over time and, in doing so, offer insights potentially useful for predicting changes in contemporary public policies regulating common-property resources as diverse as air, water, gene pools, and the internet.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.