Social Response to Environmental Variation

该项目将进行跨学科考古研究，以调查过去导致社区脆弱性和适应气候变化的社会因素。这项研究将有助于扩大社会科学和自然科学关于人与环境关系的学术研究范围。该项目对这一学术做出了贡献，超越了对全球、人类物种整体甚至整个社会规模的人与气候相互作用的评估，而是突出了对过去人类和社区对环境变化的反应在社会中如何区分为不同程度的成功的评估。例如，研究人员问：在气候变化期间，社会差异和不平等与特定社区居民的坚持性和韧性有何关系？经济交流网络和机制如何有助于提高应对区域气候变化的社会复原力和脆弱性？尽管人们倾向于将与当代气候变化相关的不稳定条件和脆弱性视为一种完全独特的现象，但大量考古学术已经证明，过去社区对气候变化的脆弱性与之相当。因此，考古学特别适合研究对气候变化的不同反应，因为考古记录提供了过去不同社区如何经历气候和降水压力的多个案例研究。研究小组将收集考古和古环境数据，以评估与两个气候快速转型时期的气候脆弱性和复原力有关的社会和经济因素。更具体地说，这项研究将考察对史前和历史时期区域夏季风行为相对戏剧性变化的不同反应；第一个背景是针对该地区经历较长时期(30年)季风中断的两个时期的社区对降水减少的反应和脆弱性。以前的考古证据表明，在这两个时期，一些社区持续了很长一段时间的气候压力，而生活在同一地区的其他社区则没有。通过结合这些不同时期和案例的考古和环境数据，将有可能评估这些不同的结果是如何发生的，并可能概括出促成特定脆弱性形成的社会因素，具体表现在环境资源和生存资源之间的物质依赖性(例如，种植者的水需求和降雨量变化之间的对应关系)、多样化资源的可能优势，以及社会关系和分配机制对承受环境压力的重要性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will conduct interdisciplinary archaeological research to investigate social factors that contributed to community vulnerabilities and resiliencies to climate change in the past. The study will contribute to a growing corpus of scholarship from both the social and natural sciences on human-environmental relationships. The project contributes to this scholarship by moving beyond an assessment of human-climate interactions at the scale of the globe, the human species as a totality, or even entire societies, to foreground instead an evaluation of how human and community responses to environmental changes in the past were differentiated within societies to various degrees of success. For instance, the researchers ask: how were social differences and inequalities related to the persistence and resilience of specific communities of inhabitants during periods of climate change? And how did economic exchange networks and mechanisms contribute to social resiliencies and vulnerabilities to regional climate change? Although there is a tendency to view precarious conditions and vulnerabilities related to contemporary climate change as a wholly unique phenomenon, a significant body of archaeological scholarship has demonstrated comparable vulnerabilities of communities in the past to transformations in climate. Archaeology is thus especially well suited to investigate differentiated responses to climate change because the archaeological record provides multiple case studies of how distinct communities in the past experienced climatic and precipitation stresses.The research team will collect archaeological and paleoenvironmental data to evaluate social and economic factors related to climatic vulnerabilities and resiliencies during two periods of rapid transformation in climate. More specifically, the research will examine differentiated responses to relatively dramatic changes in the behavior of a regional summer monsoon during prehistoric and historic periods; the first context targets community responses and vulnerabilities to decreased precipitation during two periods in which the region experienced extended periods ( 30 years) of monsoon failure. Previous archaeological evidence indicates that some communities persisted through extended periods of climatic stress during both of these periods, while others living in the same area did not. By combining archaeological and environmental data from these different periods and cases it will be possible to evaluate how these different outcomes occurred and potentially to generalize about social factors that contributed to shaping specific vulnerabilities, in terms of material dependencies between environmental and subsistence resources (e.g., correspondences between water needs of cultigens and precipitation variability), the possible advantages of diversified resources, and the significance of social relationships and distribution mechanisms to withstanding environmental stresses.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.