Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Behavioral and Environmental Adaptation in Alaska and the Yukon

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Homo sapiens have successfully colonized the world's most inhospitable regions due in large part to the species' capacity to rapidly adjust behavior in response to changing circumstances. This project aims determine how specific conditions ultimately contributed to past shifts in technology, trade, and diet to build on previous research documenting the extent of human flexibility and resilience. What factors propel important changes to hunter-gatherer subsistence in particularly marginal environments? An archaeological perspective provides a singular opportunity to track the complex relationship between human behavior and shifting external social or climatic conditions by integrating data that spans centuries, hundreds of square miles, and multiple disciplines. Where previous scholarship has focused on the human-environment relationship at distant periods in prehistory or in large-scale societies, few researchers have investigated the causes of recent, well-documented behavioral changes in hunter-gatherers. Incorporating Athabaskan perspectives and engaging Alaskan high-schoolers, this research aims to isolate the driving factors behind a clear and dramatic behavioral shift and concomitant migratory event in the recent pre-Columbian history of Subarctic North America. University of Michigan doctoral student Briana Doering will study human-environment relationships by evaluating how hunter-gatherers navigate risk in marginal environments. The work will be conducted in association with researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Colorado State University, and the University of Arizona. Specifically, this collaborative project will evaluate whether a massive volcanic eruption or population growth resulted in wide-scale shifts in Subarctic hunter-gatherer technology, diet, and trade, and an ultimate southward migration. To explain these behavioral changes, the research team will conduct excavations at four archaeological sites in central Alaska in consultation and collaboration with the descendant Athabaskan community, and study the recovered artifacts using standard statistical analyses and novel geochemical techniques. These material results will then be related to extensive archaeological, climatic, and ecological data from previous investigations in Alaska and Canada with a regional geospatial analysis. This comparative perspective combines uniquely fine-grained social and environmental data from late prehistoric Subarctic archaeological sites to demonstrate the enduring relationship between humans, their environment, and the material traces of human existence at both local and regional scales. Therefore, the results of this broadly applicable research can promote an understanding of hunter-gatherer behavior at other periods and in other regions where only coarse-grained, regional datasets are available. This concerted research will increase our understanding of human resilience generally and Athabaskan subsistence traditions specifically by comparing the knowledge of the descendant community, archaeological materials, and a wealth of fine-grained environmental data to elucidate human behavior in the past.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.