Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Integration and Culture Change

当前的气候危机是人类应对极端气候的共同历史的鲜明提醒。在考古学理论中，气候变化或自然灾害被归咎于文明的崩溃。然而，同样常见的是古代世界的政体适应或规避极端气候的例子。了解古代人如何应对严重的气候现象可以为当前和未来应对此类危机提供信息。考古学特别适合挖掘人类文化实践与其环境之间相互作用的长期记录。该项目将在直接受厄尔尼诺/南方涛动影响的考古遗址考察古代人类对极端气候的适应能力。自全新世中期以来，社会经历了厄尔尼诺/南方涛动事件，这些事件在最强大的时候改变了生态条件，在一些地方引发暴雨和洪水，在另一些地方引发严重干旱。该项目采用社区参与的方法进行挖掘和分析。通过雇用和培训居民，分发教育资源，在学校提供经常性的演讲，并准备文化遗产展览，该项目将提供长期的社区利益。这样，考古工作将与当地人民相关。该项目旨在尊重、记录和整合土著知识体系，扩大气候科学的视野，将传统和地方知识纳入其中。针对直接受ENSO事件影响的地区，本研究调查了人们将ENSO相关变化融入其社会和生态系统的三种弹性方式。首先，在当地，居民可以进入各种生态环境，包括洪泛区、海洋和沙漠环境。因此，破坏传统灌溉渠道和海洋资源的厄尔尼诺/南方涛动事件也为沙漠景观提供了机会，促进了广泛的生物群增长。这就提出了一个问题，即该地区的人们如何利用这种波动。除了不同的影响生态位，厄尔尼诺/南方涛动对邻近的沿海山谷有不同的影响。作为对这些事件的第二次适应，该项目测试了居住在沿海地区的人群之间的贸易。最后，该地区是海洋资源的战略前沿，可能参与了与居住在山谷中较高的农业集中地的人们的生计交换。厄尔尼诺/南方涛动影响到各种海拔决定的生态区的资源可用性，因此本项目还将调查沿海-高地资源交换，作为厄尔尼诺/南方涛动复原战略。总之，这个项目将结合联合收割机气候模拟和考古数据从网站的水平之前，期间，和之后的重大ENSO事件，探索当地的弹性和确定如何模式的交换波动作为基本的人类适应ENSO事件。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

The current climate crisis is a stark reminder of humanity’s shared history of dealing with climatic extremes. In archeological theory, climate change or natural disasters have been blamed for the collapse of civilizations. Equally common, however, are instances in which polities in the ancient world adapted to or circumvented climatic extremes. Learning how ancient people dealt with severe climate phenomena can inform current and future responses to such crises. Archaeology is exceptionally positioned to unearth the long record of mutual interactions between human cultural practices and their environments. This project will examine ancient human resilience to climatic extremes at the archaeological site directly affected by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. Since the mid-Holocene societies have experienced ENSO events that, when most powerful, transform ecological conditions, prompting heavy rainfall and flooding in some locations and severe drought in others. This project takes a community-engaged approach to excavation and analysis. Through hiring and training residents, distributing educational resources, offering recurring presentations at schools, and preparing cultural heritage exhibitions this project will provide long-term community benefits. In this way, archeological work will be made relevant to local people. This project aims to respect, record, and integrate Indigenous knowledge systems, broadening the vision of climate science to incorporate traditional and local knowledge. Focusing on an area directly affected by ENSO events, this research investigates three resilient ways in which people integrated ENSO-related changes into their social and ecological systems. First, in the local dimension residents had access to various ecological niches, including floodplain, ocean and desert environments.. Thus, ENSO events that disrupt traditional irrigation canals and maritime resources also offer opportunities in desert landscapes, prompting extensive biota growth. This raises the question of how people in the area took advantage of such fluctuations. In addition to differentially affecting ecological niches, ENSOs have varying impacts on neighboring coastal valleys. As a second adaptation to these events, this project tests for trade between groups of people inhabiting the coastal zone.Finally the region was a strategic forefront of maritime resources and likely participated in subsistence exchanges with people inhabiting higher, agriculturally-focused sites of the valley. ENSOs affect resource availability across the various altitudinally-determined ecological zones, so this project will also investigate coastal-highland resource exchanges as an ENSO-resilience strategy. In conclusion, this project will combine climate modeling and archaeological data from site levels before, during, and after significant ENSO events to explore local resilience and determine how patterns of exchange fluctuated as fundamental human adaptations to ENSO events.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.