Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Integration and Culture Change

当前的气候危机鲜明地提醒我们，人类在应对极端气候方面有着共同的历史。在考古学理论中，气候变化或自然灾害被认为是文明崩溃的原因。然而，同样常见的是，古代世界的政治适应或规避极端气候的例子。了解古人如何应对严重的气候现象，可以为当前和未来应对此类危机提供信息。考古学在发掘人类文化实践与其环境之间相互作用的长期记录方面处于特殊地位。该项目将在受厄尔Niño南方涛动（ENSO）事件直接影响的考古遗址研究古代人类对极端气候的适应能力。自全新世中期以来，人类社会经历了ENSO事件，当这些事件最强烈时，会改变生态条件，在一些地方引发暴雨和洪水，在另一些地方引发严重干旱。该项目采用社区参与的方式进行挖掘和分析。通过雇用和培训居民，分配教育资源，在学校定期举办讲座，以及准备文化遗产展览，该项目将为社区带来长期利益。通过这种方式，考古工作将与当地人民息息相关。该项目旨在尊重、记录和整合土著知识体系，拓宽气候科学的视野，将传统知识和地方知识结合起来。本研究以受ENSO事件直接影响的地区为研究对象，探讨了人们将ENSO相关变化融入其社会和生态系统的三种弹性方式。首先，在局部维度上，居民可以接触到各种生态位，包括洪泛平原、海洋和沙漠环境。因此，ENSO事件破坏了传统的灌溉渠和海洋资源，也为沙漠景观提供了机会，促进了广泛的生物群增长。这就提出了一个问题，即该地区的人们是如何利用这种波动的。除了对生态位的不同影响外，enso对邻近沿海山谷的影响也各不相同。作为对这些事件的第二次适应，该项目测试了居住在沿海地区的人群之间的贸易。最后，该地区是海洋资源的战略前沿，可能与居住在山谷中海拔较高、以农业为重点的地方的人们进行生存交流。enso影响着各种海拔决定的生态区的资源可用性，因此该项目还将调查沿海-高地资源交换作为enso恢复策略。总之，该项目将结合气候模型和重大ENSO事件发生之前、期间和之后的考古数据，探索当地的复原力，并确定交换模式是如何随着人类对ENSO事件的基本适应而波动的。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The current climate crisis is a stark reminder of humanity’s shared history of dealing with climatic extremes. In archeological theory, climate change or natural disasters have been blamed for the collapse of civilizations. Equally common, however, are instances in which polities in the ancient world adapted to or circumvented climatic extremes. Learning how ancient people dealt with severe climate phenomena can inform current and future responses to such crises. Archaeology is exceptionally positioned to unearth the long record of mutual interactions between human cultural practices and their environments. This project will examine ancient human resilience to climatic extremes at the archaeological site directly affected by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. Since the mid-Holocene societies have experienced ENSO events that, when most powerful, transform ecological conditions, prompting heavy rainfall and flooding in some locations and severe drought in others. This project takes a community-engaged approach to excavation and analysis. Through hiring and training residents, distributing educational resources, offering recurring presentations at schools, and preparing cultural heritage exhibitions this project will provide long-term community benefits. In this way, archeological work will be made relevant to local people. This project aims to respect, record, and integrate Indigenous knowledge systems, broadening the vision of climate science to incorporate traditional and local knowledge. Focusing on an area directly affected by ENSO events, this research investigates three resilient ways in which people integrated ENSO-related changes into their social and ecological systems. First, in the local dimension residents had access to various ecological niches, including floodplain, ocean and desert environments.. Thus, ENSO events that disrupt traditional irrigation canals and maritime resources also offer opportunities in desert landscapes, prompting extensive biota growth. This raises the question of how people in the area took advantage of such fluctuations. In addition to differentially affecting ecological niches, ENSOs have varying impacts on neighboring coastal valleys. As a second adaptation to these events, this project tests for trade between groups of people inhabiting the coastal zone.Finally the region was a strategic forefront of maritime resources and likely participated in subsistence exchanges with people inhabiting higher, agriculturally-focused sites of the valley. ENSOs affect resource availability across the various altitudinally-determined ecological zones, so this project will also investigate coastal-highland resource exchanges as an ENSO-resilience strategy. In conclusion, this project will combine climate modeling and archaeological data from site levels before, during, and after significant ENSO events to explore local resilience and determine how patterns of exchange fluctuated as fundamental human adaptations to ENSO events.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.