Tracing Human Response to Environmental Variability

预计在可预见的未来，城市人口将持续增长。在城市社会中，人为因素和气候因素造成的环境恶化是一个重要的压力因素。考古记录提供了大量的长期案例研究，表明气候破坏可能在城市社会的崩溃中发挥了重要作用。然而，环境恶化并不必然导致崩溃，过去的社会使用不同的策略来应对环境压力。了解社会如何应对环境变化可以为评估当前气候情景下的城市风险因素提供信息。为了研究过去人类对气候波动的反应，考古学家将考古遗址数据与空间上遥远的环境代理源联系起来，产生了具有挑战性的空间和时间不确定性。为了应对这一挑战，本项目结合了地质考古学、古植物学、稳定同位素和传统挖掘方法，研究了人类对过去气候变化的经验，旨在进一步阐明过去人类与环境的相互作用如何影响这些社会的技术、社会、文化和政治方面。在气候和生态梯度高度变化的多个地区，丰富的城市遗址、人类改造的景观和周期性的干湿期产生了多样性的适应性开发策略和新的社会组织形式。这个项目的重点是使用化石和现代植物岩来研究这些中心的居民如何随着时间的推移对环境变化做出反应。该项目强调使用地质考古方法来确定涉及植物岩积累的现场形成过程，并将使用烧焦植物遗骸的稳定同位素值和14C定年技术，以指数方式提高气候重建的分辨率。项目结果将与区域代理、物质文化记录和文本来源进行比较，以在多个时间、社会、文化和空间尺度上提供关于城市弹性策略的信息。该项目的研究和合作框架将为本科生和研究生提供培训和教育机会。在日益严重的干旱正在影响并将在可预见的未来继续影响数百万人的地区，了解古代社会如何协商环境约束，为公众提供了过去的例子，说明城市社会在气候变化期间面临的风险。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Urban populations are projected to continuously increase for the foreseeable future. In urban societies, environmental deterioration produced by human and climatic factors is a significant stress agent. The archaeological record offers a wealth of long-term case studies indicating that climatic disruptions may have played an important role in the breakdown of urban societies. However, environmental deterioration did not inevitably lead to collapse and past societies responded to environmental stress using different strategies. Understanding how societies coped with environmental variation could provide information for evaluating current urban risk factors under the present climatic scenario. To investigate past human responses to climate fluctuations, archaeologists correlate archaeological site data with spatially distant environmental proxy sources, producing challenging spatial and temporal uncertainty. As a result, human-scale responses to environmental shifts remain elusive when studied with conventional archaeological approachesTo address this challenge, this project approaches the human-scale experience of past-climatic shifts using a combination of geoarchaeology, paleobotany, stable isotopes, and traditional excavation methods and aims to further clarify how past human-environmental interactions influenced technological, social, cultural, and political aspects of such societies. In multiple regions highly variable climate and gradient of ecological zones, abundance of urban sites, human modified landscapes, and cyclical wet and dry periods generated a diversity of adaptive exploitation strategies and new forms of social organization. This project focuses on using both fossil and modern phytoliths to investigate how the inhabitants of such centers responded to environmental changes through time. The project emphasizes the use of geoarchaeological methods to identify site formation processes involved in phytolith accumulation and will use stable isotope values from charred plant remains and a battery of 14C dating to exponentially improve the resolution of climatic reconstructions. The project results will be compared to the regional proxies, the material culture record, and the textual sources to provide information on urban resilience strategies at multiple chronological, social, cultural, and spatial scales. The project’s research and collaboration framework will offer training and educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. In regions where increasing aridity is affecting and will continue to affect millions in the foreseeable future, understanding how ancient societies negotiated environmental constrains provides the public with examples from the past on the risks urban societies faced during climatic shifts.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.