Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Relationship between Foraging Strategy and Social Complexity

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When people harvest wild plants, they intervene in the life cycles of those plants. With time, the resulting dependencies alter the people, the plants, and the social and ecological systems in which both operate. As most research into human-plant relationships in the past focuses on the histories of domesticated crops, less is known about the dynamics of change through time in systems based on wild plants and the ecological legacy of these systems. Grace Ward, doctoral candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will study long-term wild plant management by investigating the interactions between people and plants living in the Lower Mississippi Valley roughly 4,000 years ago. This research will provide context for subsequent land use in the region, and insight into past strategies employed to live sustainably in the Mississippi floodplain. Through planned data-sharing and in-field education programs, the project is designed to extend archaeological training to local and indigenous descendant communities in a resource-impoverished area of the American South. In collaboration with geoarchaeologists, Ward and student assistants will excavate and analyze plant remains from archaeological contexts associated with the Poverty Point culture. This cultural complex lasted from approximately 4,500 to 3,000 years ago in the Lower Mississippi Valley and is defined by the fluorescence of a shared material culture and significant innovations in earthen monumental architecture. Prior work indicates that during this period and for centuries after, people in the Lower Mississippi Valley hunted and gathered wild foods and materials without reliance on domesticated plants or animals. While anthropologists have historically classed hunter-gatherer societies as inherently simple and static, monumental earthen architecture constructed during this period indicates social processes involving massive group aggregation and labor mobilization. Did plant foraging strategies shift in accordance with these markers of social change? Ward and colleagues will study the entwined histories of wild plant management and monumental construction to approach this question, informed by observed patterns in the density, diversity, and morphology of plant remains identified in samples taken from Poverty Point contexts. While the monuments of the Poverty Point culture have been included in global surveys of hunter-gatherer cultural expression, the economy underlying their construction has not been adequately explained in a manner that facilitates cross-cultural comparison. Analysis of the relationship between people and plants during this period will allow for empirical comparison with other regions in which wild plant management supported complex social structures, deepening discipline-wide understanding of the many permutations of human-environment relationships.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.