Collaborative Research: Long-Term Human Responses to Ecological Instability

鉴于考古学关注人类行为的长时间跨度，它特别适合研究社区如何设计技术和社会调整以应对威胁其稳定的长期趋势，以及这些策略如何在大规模人口迁移中达到顶峰。研究小组将采用政治生态学的观点来比较和对比社会如何通过基于地方的决策过程调解其气候和生态环境的广泛转变。该项目将开发新的方法来解决环境变化和移民研究的深时间方法。此外，它将促进印第安学生的教育和培训机会，并涉及与印第安社区的口译合作。来自佛罗里达大学（Charles Cobb博士）、密西西比大学（Edmond Boudreaux博士）、南达科他大学（Anthony Krus博士）和奇卡索民族（Brad Lieb博士）的合作者将开始一项为期多年的考古研究，研究公元15世纪北美中部大陆大量人口被遗弃的原因。这种现象覆盖了大约5万平方英里，俗称“空置区”。其他地方的考古研究表明，气候因素通常在大规模的区域人口减少中起着核心作用，最近的证据表明，在公元14世纪和15世纪，北美东部发生了一系列几十年的严重干旱。这些干旱似乎是由被称为小冰河期的全球变冷时期引起的降水剧烈波动造成的。然而，社会适应环境和社会压力的方式有极大的差异。该项目将包括对田纳西州中部和密西西比州北部两个次区域的许多考古遗址进行比较研究，这两个次区域位于较大的废弃地区。在公元1450年左右，这两个地区都发生了明显的人口外流。然而，在此之前，他们在文化和生态上有着非常不同的职业历史。研究小组将把挖掘与陶瓷来源分析、生存研究和冲突检查结合起来，以解决两个研究区域因生态和社会环境恶化而导致的人口流动、食物方式和战争的异同，以及这些过程最终如何导致同期大规模迁移。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。

Given its focus on extended temporal spans of human behavior, archaeology is particularly well suited to examine long-term trends in how communities devise both technological and social adjustments to threats to their stability, and how those strategies may culminate in large-scale population relocations. The research team will adopt the perspective of political ecology to compare and contrast how societies mediate broad transformations in their climatic and ecological surroundings through a process of locally-based decision-making. The project will develop new methods for addressing deep time approaches to the study of environmental change and migration. Further, it will promote educational and training opportunities for Native American students and involve interpretive collaboration with Native American communities.Collaborators from the University of Florida (Dr. Charles Cobb), the University of Mississippi (Dr. Edmond Boudreaux), the University of South Dakota (Dr. Anthony Krus), and the Chickasaw Nation (Dr. Brad Lieb) will embark upon a multi-year archaeological study of the causes underlying an extensive population abandonment of mid-continental North America during the fifteenth century AD. This phenomenon, covering about 50,000 square miles, is popularly known as the "Vacant Quarter." Archaeological research elsewhere has shown that climatic factors commonly play a central role in large-scale regional depopulations, and recent evidence suggests that a series of severe multi-decadal droughts struck eastern North America in the AD 1300s and 1400s. These droughts appear to have been the result of wide swings in precipitation caused by the period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Nevertheless, there is extreme variability in the ways in which societies adapt to environmental as well as social stresses. The project will involve a comparative study of a number of archaeological sites in two sub-regions, central Tennessee and northern Mississippi, in the larger abandoned region. Both areas witnessed an apparent exodus of people about AD 1450. However, prior to that time, they had very different histories of occupation culturally and ecologically. The research team will combine excavations with ceramic sourcing analyses, subsistence studies, and examinations of conflict to address similarities and differences in population movement, foodways, and warfare in the two study areas resulting from deterioration in their ecological and social surroundings, and how these processes ultimately led to contemporaneous mass migrations.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.