Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Fuel Use in Traditional Societies

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Dr. Alexia Smith and Lucas Proctor, of the University of Connecticut, will use archaeobotany to study how periods of social and political change affect peoples' energy use and fuel consumption. The collection and burning of wood, plant, or dung-based fuels is an essential daily task in the lives of people living in non-industrial societies, on par with the acquisition of food and shelter. Archaeologists have often noted that deforestation quickly follows the emergence of socio-economically complex societies and early states as a result of increased fuel needs. As populations grew and economic activities intensified, maintaining an adequate supply of fuel resources would have been increasingly important. This study examines how fuel economies change in response to a shift towards increasing socioeconomic and political complexity. While the developed world no longer relies on wood or dung fuels, many areas of the developing world still depend on access to forests and pasturelands to supply their daily energy needs. By exploring how people in early complex societies coped with fuel needs and fuel scarcity, this research will contribute to national and global discussions about the role of energy resources in sustainable economic development. An understanding of how socioeconomic factors affect how people collect and use fuel resources over long periods of time is essential to the development of forest conservation and environmental policies that can balance energy needs with the preservation of natural resources.The researchers use archaeobotany, the study of how plants and people interact, and geoarchaeological techniques, to identify and interpret fuel remains from three archaeological sites located in Northern Mesopotamia that date to the Late Chalcolithic (ca. 5300-3100 BC) and Assyrian (1300-611 BC) periods. The Late Chalcolithic in this region saw the emergence of the first socio-economically complex villages and cites, while the Assyrian period witnessed the development of the expansive Assyrian Empire, which fundamentally transformed land use patterns across the region and local administrative control of resources. Combining multiple lines of evidence from carbonized seed and wood remains, microscopic calcitic ash residues, and ethnoarchaeological data, will provide a rigorous evaluation of what fuel types were used at each site, whether different fuels or different wood species were preferred for certain tasks or by people of different statuses, and how fuel affected land use practices. The results of this project will contribute to three larger collaborative research projects that bring together international researchers and local archaeologists from Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, and Turkey in order to study the early development of social complexity in an area of endangered cultural heritage.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.