Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Adaptation to Highly Unpredictable Environments

博士论文学生Venicia Slotten将进行研究，研究火山活动地区的长期饮食和资源采购策略。这个地区每隔几个世纪就会经历一次强烈的火山活动，这极大地影响了景观，改变了人们用来获取食物、工具和药物等基本资源的生态系统。考古调查非常适合这项研究，因为它们允许对过去的生活进行长期观察，并将允许该项目调查特定的土地管理和定居策略，这些策略帮助人们在这样一个充满活力的景观中继续生活了很长一段时间，至少经历了三次主要的火山爆发。这项调查将通过展示植物与人类的相互作用来探索人们如何应对自然灾害，这种相互作用对长期生存至关重要，并可能帮助古代居民在他们的环境中保持恢复力，从而为未来的灾害指明富有成效的道路。斯洛滕和她的研究小组将挖掘一个火山保存的村庄遗址的国内背景。检查家庭环境将使调查人员能够关注过去的日常行为，并更好地了解日常生活方式。这项研究将在湖岸岸线进行，以发现被季节性湖泊水位波动积极冲走的家庭结构。剩余的考古材料将在遗址被完全摧毁之前被恢复。由于生态系统管理是历史上社会为应对环境而采用的适应性策略的主要领域之一，因此该项目将重点关注保存的植物材料的恢复，以重建过去的生态管理和知识。研究设计的核心是系统地收集植物数据，包括宏观植物遗迹（种子和木炭）以及微观植物遗迹（花粉、植物岩和淀粉）。植物遗迹是了解传统人类基本生活的重要组成部分，因为它们在景观中的主要材料是植物。该团队将生成环境模型，以帮助解释火山活动导致的过去移民和重新安置，并探索过去多社区参与和关系的潜力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

Venicia Slotten a doctoral dissertation student will undertake research to study long term diet and resource procurement strategies in a region of volcanic activity. This region experiences powerful volcanic activity every few centuries, which dramatically impacts the landscape and alters the ecosystems that people used to obtain their basic resources for food, tools, and medicine. Archaeological investigations are well suited for this study because they allow for a long-term view of past lives and will allow the project to investigate particular land management and settlement strategies that aided peoples to continue living in such a dynamic landscape over a long time through at least three major volcanic eruptions. This investigation will explore how people coped with natural disasters by demonstrating the plant-human interactions that were vital in long-term survival and could have helped the ancient inhabitants maintain resilience within their environmental setting, thus illustrating fruitful paths for future disasters.Slotten and her research team will excavate domestic contexts of a volcanically preserved village site. Examining household contexts will allow the investigators to focus on everyday practices in the past and to gain a better understanding of daily life styles. The research will be conducted on a lake shoreline to uncover household structures that are being actively washed away by the seasonally fluctuating lake levels. Remaining archaeological materials will be recovered before the site is completely destroyed. Since ecosystem management is one of the main domains of adaptive strategies that societies have employed throughout history in order to deal with their environment, this project will focus on the recovery of preserved plant material in order to reconstruct past ecological management and knowledge. At the core of the research design is a systematic collection of botanical data, including macrobotanical remains (seeds and wood charcoal) as well as microbotanical remains (pollen, phytoliths, and starch). Botanical remains are a critical component towards understanding the basic lives of traditional people, as their main material engagement within the landscape was with plants. The team will generate environmental models to aid in the interpretation of past migrations and resettlement as a result of volcanic activity and explore the potential for multi-community engagements and relationships in the past.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.