Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Settlement Transformation and Resilience

社会科学和环境科学的研究人员对了解复杂的社会如何应对环境变化非常感兴趣，从考古学中得出的叙述是研究人员和普通公众思考这一主题的方式的核心。大多数这类关于过去人类社会如何应对环境变化的叙述，将政治稳定与社会稳定混为一谈，认为如果一个政治实体存活下来，就意味着社会已经成功适应。但政体和他们所管理的各个社区的利益并不总是一致的，在一个快速变化的世界中保持政治稳定是以至少一些政治主体为代价的，他们必须承担“适应”的代价。卢克·奥尔德-托马斯是杜兰大学的博士生，他将在马塞洛·A·卡努托博士的指导下进行考古研究，以调查阿基奥塔尔腹地的社区重组情况。阿基奥塔尔是玛雅人的一个古老政体，在严重的环境变化时期幸存下来，其政治制度保持不变。这个项目促进了对受环境变化困扰的政体内发生的过程的理解，询问环境胁迫下的政治稳定是否得到社会生活其他方面的重组的保障。随着当代世界吸收环境变化的影响，政策制定者努力解决如何分配维持社会和/或政治稳定的成本，这些考虑是根本的，这项研究将揭示使政治得以持续的内部社会变革。此外，危地马拉西北部的研究地点是一个与贩毒、非法集结和砍伐森林有关的极端环境和政治压力下的地区，该项目发挥了稳定作用，帮助加强当地利益攸关方机构，使其有兴趣维护森林，建立合法和可持续的生计，特别是考古旅游业。该项目将培训危地马拉本科生在考古学中使用遥感技术，提高当地记录和保护文化遗产资源的能力。Auld-Thomas先生将利用机载激光扫描(激光雷达)快速记录森林树冠下考古特征的分布，这使得研究人员可以直接进行有针对性的挖掘，而不是花费数年时间通过传统的地面调查来定位考古遗迹。该项目为快速、激光雷达辅助的定居点调查和挖掘制定了一套严格的方法，该方法很容易适用于其他森林地区，最终使这些地区的考古研究在时间和资金方面都更有效率。通过对分布在El Achiotal周围四个密集调查的约1平方公里居民区的住宅和公共建筑(总计约50个抽样建筑)的大样本进行测试挖掘，该项目将记录人们居住的地方和他们居住的定居点类型随时间的变化，从而重建El Achiotal政体腹地的大范围社会变化，因为它应对不断变化的景观。该奖项反映了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 across the social and environmental sciences are intensely interested in understanding how complex societies respond to environmental change, and narratives drawn from archaeology are central to the way researchers and the general public think about this topic. Most such narratives about how past human societies have dealt with environmental change conflate political stability with social stability, assuming that if a political entity survives it means that the society has successfully adapted. But the interests of polities and of the individual communities they administer do not always align, and maintaining political stability in a rapidly changing world comes at the cost of at least some political subjects who must bear the costs of "adaptation." Luke Auld-Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University, will conduct archaeological research under the supervision of Dr. Marcello A. Canuto to investigate the reorganization of communities in the hinterlands of El Achiotal, an ancient Maya polity that survived a period of severe environmental change with its political institutions intact. This project advances understanding of the processes that occur within polities beset by environmental change, asking whether political stability in the context of environmental duress is underwritten by the reorganization of other aspects of social life. Such considerations are fundamental as the contemporary world absorbs the effects of environmental change and policymakers grapple with how to distribute the costs of maintaining social and/or political stability, and this research will shed light on the internal social transformations that allow polities to endure. Moreover, the research location in northwestern Guatemala is an area under extreme environmental and political pressure tied to narcotics trafficking, illegal ranging, and deforestation, and the project plays a stabilizing role by helping to strengthen local stakeholder institutions with an interest in maintaining the forest and building legal and sustainable livelihoods, specifically archaeological tourism. The project will train Guatemalan undergraduate students in the use of remote sensing technology in archaeology, increasing local capacity for documenting and preserving cultural heritage resources. Mr. Auld-Thomas will utilize airborne laser scanning (lidar) to rapidly document the distribution of archaeological features underneath forest canopy, which allows researchers to move directly to targeted excavations instead of spending years locating archaeological remains through traditional ground survey. The project develops a rigorous methodology for rapid, lidar-assisted settlement survey and excavation that is easily adaptable to other forested regions, ultimately allowing archaeological research in these areas to proceed more efficiently in terms of both time and funding. Through test excavations of a large sample of both residential and public buildings (totaling about 50 sampled buildings) distributed across four intensively-surveyed ~1km2 settlement zones around El Achiotal, this project will document changes in where people lived and in the types of settlements they inhabited through time, allowing for a reconstruction of broad-scale social changes in the hinterlands of the El Achiotal polity as it coped with a changing landscape.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.