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

该项目审查家庭和社区在处理经济和环境不确定性时采取的战略。调查的重点是如何在全球和当地的糖市场波动，政治变化，人口下降，环境变化，影响了家庭和社区的领域和工厂工人，从被征召的土著以及奴役和混血社区的殖民时代。考古重建包括当前和过去的压力源，风险评估以及在其历史背景下的反应，这是一个无法通过关注任何单一时间点或仅通过文件来获得的视角。该项目有助于在深刻的文化变革时期对经济趋势、人与环境的相互作用、复原力和身份进行比较评估，并促进社区发展的细微差别。它包括为多个参与者提供协作和教育机会。研究人员让当地社区参与进来，以确定他们认为研究的哪些组成部分在应用于政策和社区复原力方面最有用。该项目的历时性意味着它研究了考古学揭示的过去过程如何影响当代生计及其在快速经济变革中的多样化。全球经济一体化、农业集约化和经济作物生产的扩大已经改变并继续影响着曾经受殖民统治的社区。研究人员特别感兴趣的是全球经济一体化如何影响当地社区和家庭的复原力战略。人们如何评估和应对风险？它们采取了哪些替代市场参与的办法？研究区域拥有复杂的土著农业社区，殖民者招募他们在当地的糖米尔斯厂工作。对家庭适应性战略的复原力的考古学方法将使全球经济因素能够在历史糖社区的背景下进行审查。古环境重建、密集农业对该地区土壤和水道影响的地貌评估以及档案分析将补充这些遗址的考古研究并使其与环境相关联。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.