State Response to Climate Instability

一个国际小组将调查一个古老的社区如何调整他们的社会关系和生存战略，以克服在早期国家形成期间消失的水资源和不断增加的经济压力。研究人员试图了解社区如何走到一起，谈判社会复杂的关系，以克服外部压力，如不利的气候条件和区域贸易网络的需求。考古框架将提供深入的案例研究，讲述社区成员如何在这些不断变化的环境中适应日常生活，以及他们与环境合作或竞争的选择如何影响他们的生存轨迹。特别是定居考古学，通过详细的交叉记录，了解人们如何通过农业，畜牧业，工具和手工艺生产以及贸易网络构建他们的建筑景观。考古研究为建立现代社区关系提供了一个额外的好处，这是该项目的首要任务，在研究过程的发展和解释中，将咨询邻近的利益相关者。该项目将通过以研究为重点的投入会议，关于类似当前日常生活实践的人种学访谈以及参与考古解释结果，确保现代社区成员的声音充分融入研究成果的相关性。研究人员将作出特别努力，鼓励当地妇女充分参与，她们往往被排除在考古工作之外。这将通过建立由国际主要女性挖掘团队和考古本科生制作的合作培训资源来实现，这些学生来自赠款的管理机构，一所历史上的女子学院。一个国际专家团队将分析补充证据：建筑发展、物质文化生产、陶器设计和交换、栽培和野生植物的使用、家畜的驯养和狩猎，环境条件的地质和水文考古模型的支持。解释将侧重于古代社区成员基于机构的主动适应能力，而不是被动适应该地区日益干旱的条件。该项目的更广泛影响将包括开放获取详细的考古和生态事实序列数据，以便进行区域比较研究。与国际社会的合作将为基于社区的参与式考古学创造共同的方法，这种方法可以在全球范围内成功应用。该奖项反映了NSF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。

An international team will investigate how an ancient community adapted their social relationships and subsistence strategies to overcome disappearing water resources and increasing economic pressures during a period of early state formation. The researchers seek to understand how communities come together to negotiate socially complex relationships in order to overcome outside pressures, such as adverse climate conditions and demand from regional trade networks. The archaeological framework will provide in-depth case studies that tell the story of how community members adapt their daily lives within these changing circumstances, and how their choices to collaborate or compete with the environment affect the trajectory of their survival. Settlement archaeology, in particular, gives insight through a detailed, intersectional record of how people constructed their built landscape through agriculture, animal husbandry, tool and craft production, and trade networks. Archaeological research offers a complimentary benefit of building modern community relationships, a top priority for this project, where neighboring stakeholders will be consulted in the development and interpretation of the research process. This project will center the relevancy of the research outputs by ensuring the full incorporation of modern community members’ voices through research-focused input meetings, ethnographic interviews about analogous current daily-life practices, and participation in archaeological interpretation outcomes. The researchers will undertake special effort to encourage the full participation of local women, who are often excluded in archaeological work. This will be achieved by building collaborative training resources produced by the international majority-women excavation team and archaeology undergraduate students from the grant's managing institution, a historically-women’s college.An international team of experts will analyze complementary lines of evidence: architectural developments, material culture production, pottery design and exchange, use of cultivated and wild plants, domesticated livestock and hunting, supported by geo- and hydro-archaeological models of environmental conditions. Interpretation will focus on the agency-based active resilience of ancient community members, rather than a passive adaptation to increasingly arid conditions in the region. The broader impact of this project will include open-access publication of the detailed archaeological and ecofact sequence data to allow for regional comparative studies. Collaboration with international societies will create shared approaches to community based participatory archaeology that can be successfully applied globally.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.