Exploring Long Term Adaptation to Environmental Change

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Researchers will undertake both underwater and terrestrial research to understand how foraging peoples in the Americas made decisions that enabled them to adapt to the rapid environmental changes that occurred over multiple millenia. During this time, dozens of animal species had recently gone extinct or were dying out or migrating to new lands, plant communities completely transformed, lakes were forming, rivers were flooding, and sea levels rose at least 40 meters. Nevertheless, archaeological data show that people not only adjusted to these transformations, but seem to have thrived, as there are ever-increasing numbers of sites and artifacts appearing throughout this span. Although these groups were entirely reliant upon hunting, gathering, and managing resources available in the world around them, they seem to have met the challenge of extremely rapid and dramatic environmental changes with aplomb. Researchers have long wished to understand how human social, economic, and environmental systems are or are not resilient, and archaeology is particularly well placed to provide relevant insight because it can trace human systems over centuries and millennia. Nuanced understanding of how these forager societies managed to adjust to near-constant change over nearly 5,000 years of rapid environmental fluctuations can provide insight into ways to make human systems more resilient. However, nearly all the known sites contain only lithic artifacts, often in semi-disturbed contexts, severely curtailing what can be learned about social resilience. Some submerged Florida sites however are an exception. Hundreds of osseous and lithic tools have been recovered from the river, and some mid-channel sinkholes have extensive archaeological remains within intact, dateable deposits. The research team will conduct fieldwork at three sites: two adjacent submerged sinkholes and one interior terrestrial site. The two submerged sites have dateable organics and intact sediment sequences. The terrestrial site will likely not have good organic preservation compared to the sinks, but it will provide data about an area where people were not maximizing access to freshwater. Exploring human relationships with the dynamic land and waterscape entails three research and one pedagogical component: 1) creating a diachronic model of resource availability through time; 2) generating predictions for site distributions by modeling potential resource maximization strategies; and 3) assessing the archaeological record of the basin in light of these frameworks. Data from prior excavations will be combined with the new excavation data to test the utility of central place foraging models . Macro-level (geospatial modeling and paleoenvironmental reconstruction) and micro-level (intrasite analysis of features, lithic artifacts, and preserved organics) will be combined to discuss human use during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene. Equally important, this project will train some of the next generation of geoarchaeologists, teaching them how to investigate landscapes in their totality and see the waterline as an opportunity, rather than a boundary, giving them the tools to understand and manage submerging and submerged cultural resources.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.