Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Agriculture, Pastoralism And Environmental Change

Ryan Szymanski博士华盛顿州立大学的一名候选人将与美国和肯尼亚的考古学家和古生态学家合作，通过整合多代理古生态和考古数据集，调查粮食生产成为东非可行的专门生活方式的社会和环境条件。粮食生产起源的一个重要方面是人类对当地生态的影响越来越大。 近年来，人类与其整个史前的物理和文化环境之间的动态关系受到越来越多的科学审查，考古学和古生态学研究非常适合提供详细描述这些过程的细微信息。 在重建和解释这些背景方面的一个主要挑战是有信心将环境变化的原因归因于气候和/或人类活动。 更详细地了解人类地貌的改变和气候变化如何随着时间的推移在地方和区域范围内影响环境，将提高私营和公共部门当局的能力，更好地制定长期土地管理战略，以应对未来的变化。 主要项目数据将分发给地方和区域管理实体，以促进未来的资源管理，而公共介绍计划旨在教育当地社区了解资源管理的重要性。 驯化过程现在被理解为不仅包括单个植物和动物物种，而且包括整个生态和地理景观。 从这个角度来看，人类活动最终导致高度专业化，“驯化”的植物和动物物种在环境和时间背景下是可识别的，远远早于它们在物理形式上的重大变化。 具体而言，该项目旨在回答何时以及在何种情况下出现专门的粮食生产，以及采用何种策略来选择性地改变特定景观中的花卉和动物群的存在。 中央裂谷，西部高地，现代肯尼亚的沿海地区，这些过程没有很好的记录，但这是合理的众所周知的考古背景，将是本研究的区域焦点。研究人员将检查花粉，真菌孢子和植硅石（在许多植物群的细胞中发现的诊断性微观矿物增生）记录在已知考古遗址附近的湿地和湖泊集水区中保存的时间变化，并将这两种类型的数据结合起来，以便更好地了解与特定人类活动相关的环境变化。

Ryan Szymanski, Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University, collaborating with archaeologists and paleoecologists in the United States and Kenya, will investigate the social and environmental conditions under which food production emerged as a viable, specialized lifeway in East Africa by integrating multi-proxy paleoecological and archaeological data sets. One important aspect of the origins of food production is increased human impact on local ecologies. The dynamic nature of relationships between humans and their physical and cultural environments throughout prehistory has come under increasing scientific scrutiny in recent years, and both archaeological and paleoecological studies are ideally suited to provide nuanced information detailing these processes. A major challenge in the reconstruction and interpretation of these contexts is having confidence in attributing the causes of environmental change to climatic and/or human activity. More detailed understanding of the ways in which human landscape alteration and climatic change have impacted environments on both local and regional scales over time will improve the ability of authorities, in both private and public spheres, to better construct long-term land management strategies in anticipation of future change. Primary project data will be disseminated to local and regional management entities to facilitate future resource stewardship, while a program of public presentations is designed to educate local communities about the importance of resource stewardship.. Processes of domestication are now understood to include not only individual plant and animal species, but entire ecological and geographic landscapes. Viewed from this perspective, human activities leading ultimately to highly specialized, "domesticated" plant and animal species are identifiable in environmental and temporal contexts far earlier than when they become visible as significant changes in physical form. Specifically, this project seeks to answer questions of when, and in what contexts, specialized food production emerges, as well as what strategies have been used to selectively modify floral and faunal presence on given landscapes. The Central RiftValley, Western Highlands, and Coastal regions of modern Kenya, contexts where these processes are not well documented, but which are reasonably well known archaeologically, will be the regional foci for this research. The researchers will examine changes through time in the pollen, fungal spore, and phytolith (diagnostic microscopic mineral accretions found among the cells of many plant groups) record preserved in wetland and lake catchments near known archaeological sites, and contextualize both types of data in order to better understand environmental changes associated with specific human activities.