Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Relationship between Foraging Strategy and Social Complexity

当人们收获野生植物时，他们会干预这些植物的生命周期。随着时间的推移，由此产生的依赖关系会改变人类、植物以及两者所处的社会和生态系统。由于过去对人-植物关系的研究大多集中在驯化作物的历史上，人们对基于野生植物的系统中随时间变化的动态以及这些系统的生态遗产知之甚少。圣路易斯华盛顿大学的博士生格蕾丝·沃德将通过调查大约4000年前生活在密西西比河下游的人与植物之间的相互作用来研究野生植物的长期管理。这项研究将为该地区随后的土地利用提供背景，并洞察过去在密西西比河泛滥平原可持续生活所采用的战略。通过计划中的数据共享和实地教育计划，该项目旨在将考古培训扩展到美国南部资源贫困地区的当地和土著后裔社区。在与地质考古学家的合作下，沃德和学生助理将挖掘和分析与贫困点文化相关的考古背景下的植物遗骸。这个文化综合体在密西西比河下游持续了大约4500年到3000年前，以共享的物质文化和土质纪念性建筑的重大创新为特征。先前的研究表明，在这一时期以及之后的几个世纪里，密西西比河下游的人们在不依赖驯化的植物或动物的情况下，狩猎和采集野生食物和材料。虽然人类学家在历史上将狩猎-采集社会归类为天生简单和静态的，但在这一时期建造的不朽的土建筑表明了涉及大规模群体聚集和劳动力动员的社会过程。植物觅食策略是否随着这些社会变化的标志而改变？沃德和他的同事们将研究野生植物管理和纪念碑建设的交织历史，以解决这个问题，从从贫困点背景提取的样本中发现的植物遗骸的密度、多样性和形态的观察模式中获得信息。虽然贫困点文化古迹已被列入狩猎采集文化表现的全球调查，但没有以促进跨文化比较的方式充分解释其建设背后的经济。在此期间对人与植物之间关系的分析将允许与野生植物管理支持复杂社会结构的其他地区进行实证比较，加深整个学科对人与环境关系的许多排列的理解。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。

When people harvest wild plants, they intervene in the life cycles of those plants. With time, the resulting dependencies alter the people, the plants, and the social and ecological systems in which both operate. As most research into human-plant relationships in the past focuses on the histories of domesticated crops, less is known about the dynamics of change through time in systems based on wild plants and the ecological legacy of these systems. Grace Ward, doctoral candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will study long-term wild plant management by investigating the interactions between people and plants living in the Lower Mississippi Valley roughly 4,000 years ago. This research will provide context for subsequent land use in the region, and insight into past strategies employed to live sustainably in the Mississippi floodplain. Through planned data-sharing and in-field education programs, the project is designed to extend archaeological training to local and indigenous descendant communities in a resource-impoverished area of the American South. In collaboration with geoarchaeologists, Ward and student assistants will excavate and analyze plant remains from archaeological contexts associated with the Poverty Point culture. This cultural complex lasted from approximately 4,500 to 3,000 years ago in the Lower Mississippi Valley and is defined by the fluorescence of a shared material culture and significant innovations in earthen monumental architecture. Prior work indicates that during this period and for centuries after, people in the Lower Mississippi Valley hunted and gathered wild foods and materials without reliance on domesticated plants or animals. While anthropologists have historically classed hunter-gatherer societies as inherently simple and static, monumental earthen architecture constructed during this period indicates social processes involving massive group aggregation and labor mobilization. Did plant foraging strategies shift in accordance with these markers of social change? Ward and colleagues will study the entwined histories of wild plant management and monumental construction to approach this question, informed by observed patterns in the density, diversity, and morphology of plant remains identified in samples taken from Poverty Point contexts. While the monuments of the Poverty Point culture have been included in global surveys of hunter-gatherer cultural expression, the economy underlying their construction has not been adequately explained in a manner that facilitates cross-cultural comparison. Analysis of the relationship between people and plants during this period will allow for empirical comparison with other regions in which wild plant management supported complex social structures, deepening discipline-wide understanding of the many permutations of human-environment relationships.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.