Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Effect Of Diversity On Social Complexity

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Researchers have aimed to understand the social and ecological variables that influence the development and decline of complex societies. Archaeology is well-positioned to provide insight regarding this topic due to its focus on extended periods of time and changes throughout these periods. Within this broader context, this project takes a long-term perspective on human-environment relationships to understand how humans have impacted their environment and the ways these interactions helped shape past societal development and collapse. This contribution is salient because it advances the scientific knowledge of the complex relationships between the development and collapse of society and a changing environment. The use of a resilience framework to understand the ecological dimensions of social transformations makes this research applicable across many scientific topics. Additionally, understanding past socioecological dynamics is relevant to modern issues of land-use and management, particularly those concerning biodiversity. Thus, studying the role of diversity in past tropical societies informs modern policy. This project involves collaboration with many entities including national and international academic professionals, undergraduate students from the United States, and individuals from Belize. Furthermore, results from this project will be used to inform community outreach efforts that focus on improving education and literacy in Belize and more broadly.Dr. Jason Yaeger and Ms. Rebecca Friedel, of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), will investigate the variables that influence the development and decline of complex societies using a diachronic examination of the intersection of human action with the biophysical world, or human-environment relationships. Using a resilience framework, this project focuses on a case study of societal development and decline in the Mopan River valley, Belize, to test the hypothesis that: the maintenance of high diversity is critical to the resilience of societies in the face of disruptions (e.g., climatic shifts). This hypothesis will be supported if this project finds that: 1) plant diversity is high before and during early climatic disruptions that did not cause a collapse and 2) plant diversity decreases leading up to a later societal collapse that correlates with a climatic disruption. In order to examine the nuances of this hypothesis, this project will study plant diversity dynamics and the human behaviors driving those dynamics using long-term datasets at both landscape and localized scales. Together, these paleoecological and archaeobotanical data will allow for a detailed understanding of human-environment relationships and their role in the resilience of complex social and ecological systems. By integrating these multiple datasets, the researchers will be able to evaluate the main hypothesis that the maintenance of high diversity is critical to the resilience of socioecological systems in the face of perturbations by answering our two research questions: how do the dynamics of plant diversity relate to known sociopolitical and climatic histories of the Mopan valley, and what human behaviors were driving those plant diversity dynamics?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.