Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Adaptation to Highly Unpredictable Environments

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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.