State Response to Climate Instability

一个国际小组将调查一个古老的社区如何调整他们的社会关系和生存战略，以克服在建国初期不断消失的水资源和日益增加的经济压力。研究人员试图了解社区是如何走到一起，谈判复杂的社会关系，以克服外部压力，如不利的气候条件和来自区域贸易网络的需求。考古框架将提供深入的案例研究，讲述社区成员如何在这些不断变化的环境中适应他们的日常生活，以及他们选择与环境合作或竞争如何影响他们的生存轨迹。尤其是聚落考古学，通过详细的、交叉的记录，了解人们如何通过农业、畜牧业、工具和手工艺生产以及贸易网络来构建他们建造的景观。考古研究提供了建立现代社区关系的互补好处，这是该项目的首要任务，在开发和解释研究过程中将咨询邻近的利益相关者。该项目将通过注重研究的意见会议、关于类似的当前日常生活做法的人种学访谈以及参与考古解释结果，确保充分纳入现代社区成员的声音，从而集中研究成果的相关性。研究人员将做出特别努力，鼓励当地妇女充分参与考古工作，因为她们经常被排除在外。这将通过建立由国际女性占多数的挖掘团队和来自赠款管理机构(一所历史上的女性学院)的考古学本科生共同制作的培训资源来实现。一个国际专家团队将分析互补的证据线：建筑发展、物质文化生产、陶器设计和交流、栽培和野生植物的使用、驯养牲畜和狩猎，以及环境条件的地学和水文考古模型的支持。解释将侧重于古代社区成员以机构为基础的积极适应能力，而不是对该地区日益干旱的条件的被动适应。该项目的更广泛影响将包括开放获取详细的考古和生态事实序列数据，以便进行区域比较研究。与国际社会的合作将创造基于社区的参与性考古的共同方法，可以在全球成功应用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.