Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Examination of Long Term Environmental Impact of Grazing

关于环境变化和退化的研究课题涉及多个学科，涉及不同人群和受众的不同关注点。考古研究在关于环境变化的对话中起着重要作用，因为它可以在更大的时间尺度上调查人类与环境的相互作用，并提供有关社会、政治和经济塑造环境和被环境塑造的方式的重要见解。着眼于史前和早期的历史时期，该项目使用考古学的方法来研究畜牧业，农业生产和政治经济的历史如何交叉产生复杂的环境历史。在更深的时间尺度上调查人类活动和环境记录变化之间的具体联系，最终将提供更有力的经验背景，以指导公众和学术辩论，并为环境保护政策提供信息。在凯瑟琳·莫里森博士的指导下，凯利·威尔科克斯·布莱克将对南印度（印度卡纳塔克邦卡德巴克尔）一处考古遗址的动物遗骸进行动物和牙齿微磨损分析。该研究人员将把动物和牙齿微磨损数据集与植被和遥感数据结合起来，以调查在何种情况下，土地和动物利用的集约化形式是否与森林砍伐、过度放牧和土壤侵蚀相对应。本案例研究将专门研究与新石器时代、铁器时代和早期历史时期南印度资源生产战略转变及其环境影响相关的问题。这一特殊的时间背景很重要，因为它反映了一系列不同的社会和经济实践，包括该地区动物驯化的开始，以及随后城镇和城市经济的出现。一项关于不同模式的政治经济、资源生产、植被、土壤和地貌变化之间关系的实证研究将与南亚当代环境保护计划特别相关。尽管放牧的长期影响尚不为人所知，但这些计划将放牧和动物放牧等过程描述为固有的环境破坏。这项研究的结果将为集约化农业生产和畜牧业的影响提供一个急需的长期视角，并将批判性地评估如何根据现有保护计划中建立的假设和意识形态来解读经验证据。虽然这个例子是针对南亚现有的环境问题和政策的，但所提供的分析框架可以在其他区域复制，并提供对当今全球环境问题的见解。重要的是，这项研究将利用考古证据，不仅有助于说明人类与环境相互作用的复杂性，而且还将重建过去的人口如何感知环境压力事件以及他们如何应对这些事件，为如何应对和潜在地补救特定形式的环境退化提供新的和多样化的视角。

Research topics on environmental change and degradation span multiple scholarly disciplines and speak to varying concerns across different populations and audiences. Archaeological research plays an important role in conversations on environmental change as it can investigate human-environmental interactions across greater time scales and provide important insight on the ways society, politics, and economy both shape and are shaped by the environment. Looking at prehistoric and early historic time periods, this project uses an archaeological approach to investigate how histories of animal husbandry, agricultural production, and political economy intersected to produce complex environmental histories. Investigating specific articulations between human activities and changes in the environmental record at deeper time scales will ultimately provide a stronger empirical context to guide public and scholarly debate as well as inform environmental conservation policies. Under the direction of Dr. Kathleen Morrison, Co-PI Kelly Wilcox Black will conduct faunal and dental microwear analysis on animal remains from an archaeological site located in South India (Kadebakele, Karnataka India). The researcher will combine faunal and dental microwear datasets with vegetation and remote sensing data in order to investigate whether and under what circumstances, intensified forms of land and animal use corresponded with deforestation, overgrazing, and soil erosion. This case study will specifically examine questions related to shifts in resource production strategies and their environmental impacts over the course of the Neolithic, Iron Age, and Early Historic periods in South India. This particular temporal context is important because it captures a diverse set of social and economic practices, including the beginnings of animal domestication in the region, as well as the subsequent emergence of towns and urban economies. An empirically informed study concerning the relationship between different modes of political economy, resource production, and changes in vegetation, soils, and landforms will be specifically relevant to contemporary environment conservation programs in South Asia. Such programs depict processes such has pastoralism and animal grazing as inherently environmentally destructive despite the fact that the long-term impacts of grazing are poorly understood. The results from this research will provide a much-needed long-term perspective on the impacts of intensified agricultural production and livestock grazing and will critically evaluate how the empirical evidence can be read against the assumptions and ideologies that are built into existing conservation programs. Although this example is specific to the environmental concerns and policies existing in South Asia, the analytical framework provided can be replicated in other regions and provide insight into present day global environmental concerns. Importantly, this research will use archaeological evidence not only to help illustrate the complexity underlying human-environmental interactions over time, but to also reconstruct how populations in the past perceived episodes of environmental stress and how they responded to them, offering new and diverse perspectives into how to cope with and potentially remedy particular forms of environmental degradation.