Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Adaptation to Highly Unpredictable Environments

博士研究生Venicia Slotten将从事一项研究，研究火山活动区的长期饮食和资源获取策略。该地区每隔几个世纪就会经历一次强烈的火山活动，这极大地影响了景观，改变了人们用来获取食物、工具和药品的基本资源的生态系统。考古调查非常适合这项研究，因为它们允许对过去的生活有一个长期的看法，并将使该项目能够调查特定的土地管理和定居战略，这些战略帮助人们通过至少三次主要火山喷发，在很长一段时间内继续生活在这种充满活力的景观中。这项调查将通过展示植物与人类的相互作用来探索人们如何应对自然灾害。植物与人类的相互作用对长期生存至关重要，可以帮助古代居民在他们的环境中保持韧性，从而为未来的灾难指明了富有成效的道路。斯洛滕和她的研究团队将挖掘一个火山保存下来的村庄遗址的家庭背景。检查家庭环境将使调查人员能够专注于过去的日常做法，并更好地了解日常生活方式。这项研究将在湖岸线上进行，以揭示正在被季节性波动的湖泊水位冲走的家庭建筑。在遗址被完全摧毁之前，将找回剩余的考古材料。由于生态系统管理是社会历史上为处理其环境而采用的适应性战略的主要领域之一，该项目将侧重于恢复保存下来的植物材料，以重建过去的生态管理和知识。研究设计的核心是对植物学数据的系统收集，包括大型植物遗骸(种子和木炭)以及微型植物遗迹(花粉、植物硅体和淀粉)。植物遗迹是了解传统人类基本生活的关键组成部分，因为他们在景观中的主要物质参与是与植物。该团队将生成环境模型，以帮助解释过去火山活动造成的移民和重新安置，并探索过去多社区参与和关系的潜力。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。

Venicia Slotten a doctoral dissertation student will undertake research to study long term diet and resource procurement strategies in a region of volcanic activity. This region experiences powerful volcanic activity every few centuries, which dramatically impacts the landscape and alters the ecosystems that people used to obtain their basic resources for food, tools, and medicine. Archaeological investigations are well suited for this study because they allow for a long-term view of past lives and will allow the project to investigate particular land management and settlement strategies that aided peoples to continue living in such a dynamic landscape over a long time through at least three major volcanic eruptions. This investigation will explore how people coped with natural disasters by demonstrating the plant-human interactions that were vital in long-term survival and could have helped the ancient inhabitants maintain resilience within their environmental setting, thus illustrating fruitful paths for future disasters.Slotten and her research team will excavate domestic contexts of a volcanically preserved village site. Examining household contexts will allow the investigators to focus on everyday practices in the past and to gain a better understanding of daily life styles. The research will be conducted on a lake shoreline to uncover household structures that are being actively washed away by the seasonally fluctuating lake levels. Remaining archaeological materials will be recovered before the site is completely destroyed. Since ecosystem management is one of the main domains of adaptive strategies that societies have employed throughout history in order to deal with their environment, this project will focus on the recovery of preserved plant material in order to reconstruct past ecological management and knowledge. At the core of the research design is a systematic collection of botanical data, including macrobotanical remains (seeds and wood charcoal) as well as microbotanical remains (pollen, phytoliths, and starch). Botanical remains are a critical component towards understanding the basic lives of traditional people, as their main material engagement within the landscape was with plants. The team will generate environmental models to aid in the interpretation of past migrations and resettlement as a result of volcanic activity and explore the potential for multi-community engagements and relationships 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.