Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Adaptation to Long Term Environmental Unpredictability

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This project investigates how subsistence strategies helped people in an arid region manage environmental risk and uncertainty. As aridification increases worldwide, it is important to understand the complex dynamics of local environments and knowledge systems over long timescales to help sustain human lifeways in arid zones. This is especially important for arable areas that are crucial for food production within arid regions. Archaeology informs the development of adaptive, resilient subsistence strategies by offering a deep-time perspective on how humans and the environment shaped contemporary landscapes. It also provides examples of the diverse ways that humans have interacted with the environment and dealt with environmental change. Despite traditional characterizations of drylands as static, uninhabitable, and agriculturally marginal, many arid zones have changed dramatically over time and have long histories of human occupation. This project builds on recent studies contending that arid lands are fluctuating landscapes with rich natural resources. This research focuses on human subsistence strategies, which are important for climate resiliency because subsistence is central to risk management systems and deeply tied to shifting climate and environmental conditions. The project will generate research partnerships building upon a multi-year collaborative field project that has trained both doctoral and undergraduate students. Risk management is typically embedded in cultural practice and includes strategies like diet diversification, food storage, intensified resource production, or resource exchange. This project will examine how these types of risk buffering techniques operated within a hyperarid coastal landscape, which has been impacted for millennia by El Niño climatic fluctuations and tectonic activity. The project focuses on a small valley with a long-term occupation history. The researchers will analyze sediment samples and various archaeological plant and animal remains to determine local subsistence practices and the exploitation of coastal desert microenvironments during the occupation. The work will incorporate microbotanical analyses into this comprehensive subsistence reconstruction to investigate how coastal villagers managed and procured diverse wild and agricultural resources. The project will use geoarchaeological analyses of sediments to create a paleoenvironmental record for the region, and this will contextualize risk management and resource procurement within a long-term history of local environmental change. The project will contribute to understanding how different subsistence systems relate to experiences of risk in arid regions worldwide.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.