Collaborative Research: Changes In Landscape, Labor And Livelihood In Long Chronological Context

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This project examines the strategies that households and communities undertake when dealing with economic and environmental uncertainty. The investigation focuses on how global and local fluctuation in sugar markets, political shifts, demographic decline, and environmental change, have affected the households and communities of field and mill workers, beginning with conscripted indigenous as well as enslaved and mestizo communities of the colonial era. Archaeological reconstructions situate present and past stressors, evaluations of risk, and responses within their historical context, a perspective that is not accessible through a focus on any single point of time, or through documents alone. This project contributes to the comparative assessment of economic trends, human-environmental interactions, resilience, and identity during periods of profound cultural change, and facilitate nuanced approaches to community development. It includes collaboration and education opportunities for multiple participants. The researchers engage local communities to determine what components of the study they find most useful in terms of application to policy and community resilience. The diachronic nature of the project means that it examines how past processes, revealed archaeologically, have influenced contemporary livelihoods and their diversification in the face of rapid economic change. Global economic integration, agricultural intensification, and the expansion of cash crop production has transformed and continues to affect communities that were once subjected to colonial domination. The researchers are specifically interested in how global economic integration has affected resilience strategies of local communities and households. How have people evaluated and responded to risk? What alternatives to market participation have they adopted? The study region hosted complex indigenous agricultural communities, which colonists conscripted to work in local sugar mills. An archaeological approach to the resilience of household adaptive strategies will enable global economic factors to be examined within the context of historical sugar communities. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions, geomorphological assessments of the impact of intensive agriculture on area soils and waterways, and archival analysis will complement and contextualize the archaeological study of these sites.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.