Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Effect Of Diversity On Social Complexity

研究人员的目标是了解影响复杂社会发展和衰落的社会和生态变量。考古学很好地提供了关于这个主题的见解，因为它关注的是延长的时间段和这些时期的变化。在这一更广泛的背景下，该项目从人与环境关系的长期角度来理解人类如何影响其环境，以及这些互动如何帮助塑造过去的社会发展和崩溃。这一贡献之所以突出，是因为它促进了对社会发展和崩溃与不断变化的环境之间复杂关系的科学认识。使用复原力框架来理解社会变革的生态层面，使这项研究适用于许多科学主题。此外，了解过去的社会生态动态与土地利用和管理的现代问题有关，特别是与生物多样性有关的问题。因此，研究多样性在过去热带社会中的作用可以为现代政策提供信息。该项目涉及与许多实体的合作，包括国家和国际学术专业人员、来自美国的本科生和来自伯利兹的个人。此外，该项目的成果将用于社区宣传工作，重点是改善伯利兹乃至更广泛的教育和扫盲。德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校(UTSA)的Jason Yaeger和Rebecca Friedel女士将通过历时考察人类行动与生物物理世界的交集，或人与环境的关系，来研究影响复杂社会发展和衰落的变量。利用复原力框架，该项目侧重于伯利兹莫潘河流域社会发展和衰落的案例研究，以检验以下假设：维持高度多样性对于社会在面对干扰(例如，气候变化)时的复原力至关重要。如果该项目发现：1)在没有导致崩溃的早期气候破坏之前和期间，植物多样性很高；2)植物多样性下降，导致后来与气候破坏相关的社会崩溃，这一假说将得到支持。为了检验这一假设的细微差别，该项目将使用景观和局部尺度的长期数据集来研究植物多样性动态以及驱动这些动态的人类行为。总之，这些古生态和考古植物学数据将使人们能够详细了解人类与环境的关系及其在复杂社会和生态系统的复原力中所起的作用。通过整合这些多个数据集，研究人员将能够通过回答我们的两个研究问题来评估主要假设，即维持高度多样性对于社会生态系统在面临扰动时的弹性至关重要：植物多样性的动态如何与磨盘山谷已知的社会政治和气候历史相关，以及哪些人类行为推动了这些植物多样性的动态？这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Researchers have aimed to understand the social and ecological variables that influence the development and decline of complex societies. Archaeology is well-positioned to provide insight regarding this topic due to its focus on extended periods of time and changes throughout these periods. Within this broader context, this project takes a long-term perspective on human-environment relationships to understand how humans have impacted their environment and the ways these interactions helped shape past societal development and collapse. This contribution is salient because it advances the scientific knowledge of the complex relationships between the development and collapse of society and a changing environment. The use of a resilience framework to understand the ecological dimensions of social transformations makes this research applicable across many scientific topics. Additionally, understanding past socioecological dynamics is relevant to modern issues of land-use and management, particularly those concerning biodiversity. Thus, studying the role of diversity in past tropical societies informs modern policy. This project involves collaboration with many entities including national and international academic professionals, undergraduate students from the United States, and individuals from Belize. Furthermore, results from this project will be used to inform community outreach efforts that focus on improving education and literacy in Belize and more broadly.Dr. Jason Yaeger and Ms. Rebecca Friedel, of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), will investigate the variables that influence the development and decline of complex societies using a diachronic examination of the intersection of human action with the biophysical world, or human-environment relationships. Using a resilience framework, this project focuses on a case study of societal development and decline in the Mopan River valley, Belize, to test the hypothesis that: the maintenance of high diversity is critical to the resilience of societies in the face of disruptions (e.g., climatic shifts). This hypothesis will be supported if this project finds that: 1) plant diversity is high before and during early climatic disruptions that did not cause a collapse and 2) plant diversity decreases leading up to a later societal collapse that correlates with a climatic disruption. In order to examine the nuances of this hypothesis, this project will study plant diversity dynamics and the human behaviors driving those dynamics using long-term datasets at both landscape and localized scales. Together, these paleoecological and archaeobotanical data will allow for a detailed understanding of human-environment relationships and their role in the resilience of complex social and ecological systems. By integrating these multiple datasets, the researchers will be able to evaluate the main hypothesis that the maintenance of high diversity is critical to the resilience of socioecological systems in the face of perturbations by answering our two research questions: how do the dynamics of plant diversity relate to known sociopolitical and climatic histories of the Mopan valley, and what human behaviors were driving those plant diversity dynamics?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.