Collaborative Research: Long-Term Human Responses to Ecological Instability

考古学的重点是延长人类行为的时间跨度，它特别适合研究社区如何设计技术和社会调整以应对对其稳定的威胁，以及这些策略如何最终导致大规模人口迁移的长期趋势。研究小组将采用政治生态学的观点，比较和对比社会如何通过以当地为基础的决策过程调解其气候和生态环境的广泛变化。该项目将开发新的方法，解决深入研究环境变化和移徙问题的办法。来自佛罗里达大学(Charles Cobb博士)、密西西比大学(Edmond Boudreaux博士)、南达科他大学(Anthony Kruus博士)和契卡索民族(Brad Lieb博士)的合作人员将开始一项为期多年的考古研究，研究公元15世纪北美中部大陆人口被广泛遗弃的原因。这种现象占地约5万平方英里，通常被称为“空置区”。其他地方的考古研究表明，气候因素通常在大规模的区域人口减少中发挥核心作用，最近的证据表明，在公元16世纪和14世纪，北美东部发生了一系列严重的数十年干旱。这些干旱似乎是被称为小冰期的全球降温时期造成的降水大幅波动的结果。然而，在社会适应环境和社会压力的方式上存在着极端的差异。该项目将对田纳西州中部和密西西比州北部两个子区域的一些考古遗址进行比较研究，这些考古遗址位于更大的废弃地区。公元1450年左右，这两个地区都出现了明显的人口外流。然而，在此之前，他们在文化和生态上有着截然不同的占领历史。研究小组将把挖掘与陶瓷来源分析、生存研究和冲突检查相结合，以解决由于生态和社会环境恶化而导致的两个研究地区在人口流动、食物和战争方面的异同，以及这些过程最终如何导致同期的大规模移民。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Given its focus on extended temporal spans of human behavior, archaeology is particularly well suited to examine long-term trends in how communities devise both technological and social adjustments to threats to their stability, and how those strategies may culminate in large-scale population relocations. The research team will adopt the perspective of political ecology to compare and contrast how societies mediate broad transformations in their climatic and ecological surroundings through a process of locally-based decision-making. The project will develop new methods for addressing deep time approaches to the study of environmental change and migration. Further, it will promote educational and training opportunities for Native American students and involve interpretive collaboration with Native American communities.Collaborators from the University of Florida (Dr. Charles Cobb), the University of Mississippi (Dr. Edmond Boudreaux), the University of South Dakota (Dr. Anthony Krus), and the Chickasaw Nation (Dr. Brad Lieb) will embark upon a multi-year archaeological study of the causes underlying an extensive population abandonment of mid-continental North America during the fifteenth century AD. This phenomenon, covering about 50,000 square miles, is popularly known as the "Vacant Quarter." Archaeological research elsewhere has shown that climatic factors commonly play a central role in large-scale regional depopulations, and recent evidence suggests that a series of severe multi-decadal droughts struck eastern North America in the AD 1300s and 1400s. These droughts appear to have been the result of wide swings in precipitation caused by the period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Nevertheless, there is extreme variability in the ways in which societies adapt to environmental as well as social stresses. The project will involve a comparative study of a number of archaeological sites in two sub-regions, central Tennessee and northern Mississippi, in the larger abandoned region. Both areas witnessed an apparent exodus of people about AD 1450. However, prior to that time, they had very different histories of occupation culturally and ecologically. The research team will combine excavations with ceramic sourcing analyses, subsistence studies, and examinations of conflict to address similarities and differences in population movement, foodways, and warfare in the two study areas resulting from deterioration in their ecological and social surroundings, and how these processes ultimately led to contemporaneous mass migrations.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.