State Response to Climate Instability

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An international team will investigate how an ancient community adapted their social relationships and subsistence strategies to overcome disappearing water resources and increasing economic pressures during a period of early state formation. The researchers seek to understand how communities come together to negotiate socially complex relationships in order to overcome outside pressures, such as adverse climate conditions and demand from regional trade networks. The archaeological framework will provide in-depth case studies that tell the story of how community members adapt their daily lives within these changing circumstances, and how their choices to collaborate or compete with the environment affect the trajectory of their survival. Settlement archaeology, in particular, gives insight through a detailed, intersectional record of how people constructed their built landscape through agriculture, animal husbandry, tool and craft production, and trade networks. Archaeological research offers a complimentary benefit of building modern community relationships, a top priority for this project, where neighboring stakeholders will be consulted in the development and interpretation of the research process. This project will center the relevancy of the research outputs by ensuring the full incorporation of modern community members’ voices through research-focused input meetings, ethnographic interviews about analogous current daily-life practices, and participation in archaeological interpretation outcomes. The researchers will undertake special effort to encourage the full participation of local women, who are often excluded in archaeological work. This will be achieved by building collaborative training resources produced by the international majority-women excavation team and archaeology undergraduate students from the grant's managing institution, a historically-women’s college.An international team of experts will analyze complementary lines of evidence: architectural developments, material culture production, pottery design and exchange, use of cultivated and wild plants, domesticated livestock and hunting, supported by geo- and hydro-archaeological models of environmental conditions. Interpretation will focus on the agency-based active resilience of ancient community members, rather than a passive adaptation to increasingly arid conditions in the region. The broader impact of this project will include open-access publication of the detailed archaeological and ecofact sequence data to allow for regional comparative studies. Collaboration with international societies will create shared approaches to community based participatory archaeology that can be successfully applied globally.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.