Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Historical Ecology of Alluvial Landscapes

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.