Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Drought, Water And Sustainable Cultural Practices

面对日益增长的需求和气候变化，研究人员、公众和管理机构越来越关注社会将如何可持续地管理宝贵的自然资源，如水。考古学可以提供洞察，了解社区在过去是如何面对类似问题的。在克里斯托弗·鲁斯博士的指导下，迈克尔·艾瓦拉西特将调查史前干旱如何影响新墨西哥州杰梅兹山脉普埃布隆祖先社区的长期可持续性。这项研究是及时的，因为美国西南部正在经历一场规模和严重的干旱，这是15世纪和16世纪史前祖先普埃布隆人最后一次看到的干旱。通过将现有的考古数据集和高分辨率的古气候数据与史前储水特征的新的低影响数据恢复技术相结合，这项研究将为社区如何适应气候变化提供一个长期的视角。探索水、气候和文化之间关系的科学和历史课程将为该地区美洲原住民后裔社区的学生开发。这项研究将成为考古学家如何超越气候变化和文化变化之间的简单因果联系的例子，通过承认最终推动社区对气候变化的适应(或脆弱性)的社会动力。毗邻的赫梅兹高原和帕加里托高原为本次调查提供了理想的环境。虽然这些地区拥有相似的自然环境、气候历史和史前适应能力，但这些地区的文化史在15世纪和16世纪的干旱期间有所不同。Pajarito高原的大社区被遗弃，而Jemez高原的大社区一直存在，直到17世纪西班牙人驱逐了当地居民。干旱经常被认为是帕贾里托被放弃的原因，但很少有人考虑这是如何发生的，或者为什么杰梅兹高原的社区坚持下来，经历了类似的条件。这两个地区的大型村庄都有蓄水设施，被认为是用来存放生活用水的水库。这些功能将被直接测试以重建这些功能的使用寿命历史，然后将作为了解社区如何采取集体行动解决资源管理问题的代理。利用考古地质学、水文地质学和经济模型得出的预测，将比较这些地区之间社区对干旱的反应。将对社区水收支模型和基于树木年轮的干旱周期重建进行比较，以确定这些特征何时以及如何发挥作用，以确定这些特征对整个社区水收支的贡献，以及这些地区之间对干旱的社区反应是否存在差异。正式的成本效益分析将被用来模拟参与水集体管理的收益是否在干旱之前、期间或之后有所不同。这项研究有可能评估气候变化、资源管理和社区可持续性之间的关系，使用的方法与社会科学家评估现代社区对气候变化的脆弱性的方法类似。

Researchers, the public, and governing agencies are increasingly concerned about how societies will sustainably manage precious natural resources, such as water, in the face of both increasing demands and climate change. Archaeology can provide insights into how communities confronted similar problems in the past. Under the direction of Dr. Christopher Roos, Michael Aiuvalasit will investigate how prehistoric droughts impacted the long-term sustainability of Ancestral Puebloan communities in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. This study is timely because the American Southwest is experiencing a drought of a magnitude and severity last seen by prehistoric Ancestral Puebloans in the 15th and 16th centuries. By integrating existing archaeological datasets and high resolution paleoclimatic data with new low-impact data recovery techniques at prehistoric water storage features, this study will provide a long-term perspective on how communities adapt to climate change. Science and history curriculum exploring the relationship between water, climate, and culture will be developed for students in descendant Native American communities in the region.This study will serve as an example for how archaeologists can move beyond making simple causal links between changes in climate and culture by acknowledging the social dynamics that ultimately drive community resilience (or vulnerability) to climate change. The adjacent Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus in the Jemez Mountains provide an ideal context for this investigation. While these regions share similar physical contexts, climate histories, and prehistoric adaptations the cultural histories of these regions diverged during droughts in the 15th and 16th centuries. Large communities of the Pajarito Plateau were abandoned, while those of the Jemez Plateau persisted until the Spanish removed local populations in the 17th century. Drought has often been evoked as a cause for the abandonment of the Pajarito, but little consideration has been given to how this happened, or why communities of the Jemez Plateau persevered through analogous conditions. Water storage features, thought to be reservoirs used to hold domestic water, are found at large village sites in both regions. These features will be directly tested to reconstruct the use-life histories of these features, which will then serve as a proxy for understanding how communities took collective action to solve resource management problems. Using archaeological geology, hydrogeology, and predications derived from economic modeling, the responses to droughts by communities between these regions will be compared. Models of community water budgets and tree-ring based reconstructions of drought periodicities will be compared to when and how these features functioned to establish the contributions these features to overall community water budgets, and whether or not there were differences in communal responses to droughts between these regions. Formal cost-benefit analyses will be used to model whether the payoffs for participating in collective management of water were different before, during, or after droughts. This study has the potential to assess the relationship between climate change, resource management, and community sustainability using similar approaches to those used by social scientists who evaluate the vulnerability of modern communities to climate change.