Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Historical Ecology of Alluvial Landscapes

近几十年来，考古研究提供了对作物驯化、低水平耕作和农业在不同景观中传播对环境影响的历史的重要理解。越来越多的古植物学证据表明，从几千年前开始，殖民前的社会就拥有修改和适应环境变化的工具和知识。今天的社区正面临着季节模式变化、反复发生的干旱以及更强烈和更频繁的飓风带来的新挑战。来自世界各地的地质考古记录提供了过去社区如何适应类似挑战的例子，从而为指导未来的土地使用管理决策提供了经验教训。该项目通过确定一个在地质考古研究中被严重低估的区域在殖民前时期的社会和环境变化的不同时期，为岛屿环境中人类世的新兴学术做出了贡献。来自多个学科的当地本科生和研究生将参加这项研究的实地和实验室部分，在那里他们将学习地质考古方法、理论框架和分析。通过这些经历，学生们获得了对他们自己和社会适应能力至关重要的技能和知识。这一博士论文项目追溯了人类土地利用的长期历史及其在冲积山谷的两个较低流域的影响，这两个流域容易受到环境变化和人类土地利用的影响，但这两个流域一直是定居的首选地点。研究人员问：该地区的植被和水文随着时间的推移发生了怎样的变化？这些集水区的景观变化与当代人类土地利用有何关系？这些人为景观的生态遗产是什么？今天的社区仍然如何适应这些累积的遗产？为了解决这些问题，该项目评估了与定居点模式和自给自足经济相关的长期环境变化。具体地说，研究人员将系统地收集这些河流泛滥平原和一个泻湖的沉积物岩心，然后分析它们的化学和物理性质、植物硅体和放射性碳测年。这些不同的古环境证据将与集水盆地边界内考古遗址的档案信息结合在一起。该项目将制作和测试从早期到现在人类占领这两个流域的模型。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。

In recent decades, archaeological research has provided critical understanding about the history of environmental impacts of crop domestication, low-level cultivation, and the spread of agriculture in diverse landscapes. Mounting paleo-botanical evidence has demonstrated that pre-colonial societies, starting millennia ago, had the tools and knowledge to modify and adapt to environmental variability. Present-day communities are facing new challenges from shifting seasonal patterns, recurring droughts, and intense and more frequent hurricanes. Geoarchaeological records from around the world have provided examples of how past communities adapted to similar challenges, and thus supply lessons for guiding future land-use management decisions. This project contributes to the emerging scholarship of the Anthropocene in island settings by identifying different episodes of social and environmental change during the pre-colonial period in a region that is highly underrepresented in geoarchaeological research. Local undergraduate and graduate students from multiple disciplines will participate in the field and laboratory components of this research, where they will learn geoarchaeological methods, theoretical frameworks, and analyses. Through these experiences, students build skills and gain knowledge that are crucial to their own and societal resilience. This doctoral dissertation project traces the long-term history of human land-use and its impacts in two lower catchments of alluvial valleys that are susceptible to environmental variability and human land-use, but which have been preferred locations for settlement. The investigators ask: how has the vegetation and hydrology of the region changed over time? How do episodes of landscape change relate to contemporary human land-use in these catchments? What are the ecological legacies of these anthropogenic landscapes and how are present-day communities still adapting to these cumulative legacies? To address these questions, the project assesses long-term environmental changes associated with settlement patterns and subsistence economies. Specifically, the researchers will systematically collect sediments cores from these river floodplains and a lagoon, and then analyze their chemistry and physical properties, phytoliths, and radiocarbon dates. These various lines of paleoenvironmental evidence will be combined with archival information about archaeological sites within the boundaries the catchment basins. The project will produce and test models of human occupation of both catchments from early periods to the present.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.