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Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Settlement Transformation and Resilience

博士论文改进奖：住区转型与复原力

基本信息

批准号：
1917106
负责人：
Marcello Canuto
金额：
$ 1.57万
依托单位：
Tulane University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2019
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2019-08-01 至 2021-09-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1917106&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award Settlement

项目摘要

Researchers across the social and environmental sciences are intensely interested in understanding how complex societies respond to environmental change, and narratives drawn from archaeology are central to the way researchers and the general public think about this topic. Most such narratives about how past human societies have dealt with environmental change conflate political stability with social stability, assuming that if a political entity survives it means that the society has successfully adapted. But the interests of polities and of the individual communities they administer do not always align, and maintaining political stability in a rapidly changing world comes at the cost of at least some political subjects who must bear the costs of "adaptation." Luke Auld-Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University, will conduct archaeological research under the supervision of Dr. Marcello A. Canuto to investigate the reorganization of communities in the hinterlands of El Achiotal, an ancient Maya polity that survived a period of severe environmental change with its political institutions intact. This project advances understanding of the processes that occur within polities beset by environmental change, asking whether political stability in the context of environmental duress is underwritten by the reorganization of other aspects of social life. Such considerations are fundamental as the contemporary world absorbs the effects of environmental change and policymakers grapple with how to distribute the costs of maintaining social and/or political stability, and this research will shed light on the internal social transformations that allow polities to endure. Moreover, the research location in northwestern Guatemala is an area under extreme environmental and political pressure tied to narcotics trafficking, illegal ranging, and deforestation, and the project plays a stabilizing role by helping to strengthen local stakeholder institutions with an interest in maintaining the forest and building legal and sustainable livelihoods, specifically archaeological tourism. The project will train Guatemalan undergraduate students in the use of remote sensing technology in archaeology, increasing local capacity for documenting and preserving cultural heritage resources. Mr. Auld-Thomas will utilize airborne laser scanning (lidar) to rapidly document the distribution of archaeological features underneath forest canopy, which allows researchers to move directly to targeted excavations instead of spending years locating archaeological remains through traditional ground survey. The project develops a rigorous methodology for rapid, lidar-assisted settlement survey and excavation that is easily adaptable to other forested regions, ultimately allowing archaeological research in these areas to proceed more efficiently in terms of both time and funding. Through test excavations of a large sample of both residential and public buildings (totaling about 50 sampled buildings) distributed across four intensively-surveyed ~1km2 settlement zones around El Achiotal, this project will document changes in where people lived and in the types of settlements they inhabited through time, allowing for a reconstruction of broad-scale social changes in the hinterlands of the El Achiotal polity as it coped with a changing landscape.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.

社会科学和环境科学的研究人员对了解复杂的社会如何应对环境变化非常感兴趣，而从考古学中得出的叙述是研究人员和公众思考这一主题的方式的核心。大多数关于过去人类社会如何应对环境变化的叙述都将政治稳定与社会稳定混为一谈，假设如果一个政治实体生存下来，就意味着这个社会已经成功地适应了环境变化。但是，政治的利益和他们所管理的各个社区的利益并不总是一致的，在一个迅速变化的世界中保持政治稳定是以至少一些政治主体必须承担“适应”的代价为代价的。“卢克·奥德-托马斯博士杜兰大学的候选人，将在马塞洛博士的监督下进行考古研究。Canuto调查El Achiotal地区的社区重组，El Achiotal是一个古老的玛雅政体，在一段严重的环境变化时期幸存下来，其政治机构完好无损。该项目促进了对受环境变化困扰的政体内发生的过程的理解，询问环境胁迫背景下的政治稳定是否由社会生活其他方面的重组所保证。这些考虑是根本的，因为当代世界吸收环境变化的影响，政策制定者努力与如何分配维持社会和/或政治稳定的成本，这项研究将揭示内部社会变革，使政治持久。此外，危地马拉西北部的研究地点是一个与毒品贩运，非法狩猎和森林砍伐有关的极端环境和政治压力下的地区，该项目通过帮助加强当地利益相关者机构，维护森林和建立法律的和可持续生计，特别是考古旅游，发挥了稳定作用。该项目将培训危地马拉大学生在考古学中使用遥感技术，提高当地记录和保护文化遗产资源的能力。Auld-Thomas先生将利用机载激光扫描（激光雷达）快速记录森林树冠下考古特征的分布，这使研究人员能够直接进行有针对性的挖掘，而不是花费数年时间通过传统的地面调查来定位考古遗迹。该项目为快速、激光雷达辅助的定居点调查和挖掘开发了一种严格的方法，该方法很容易适应其他森林地区，最终使这些地区的考古研究在时间和资金方面都能更有效地进行。通过对大量住宅和公共建筑的试掘，（共计约50个抽样建筑）分布在El Achiotal周围4个经过密集调查的约1平方公里的定居区，该项目将记录人们居住的地方和他们居住的定居点类型的变化，允许重建广泛的规模的社会变化，在埃尔Achiotal政体的荒地，因为它应对不断变化的景观。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，