Collaborative Research: The Role Of Climate In Agricultural Intensification And Settlement Trends

The investigators will examine the cooperative relationships among farmers and government institutions that enabled the development of about 150 sq km of prehistoric agricultural raised fields. This occurred during a period of peak population density and complexity with settlements established around monumental earthen constructions, including temples and ballcourts that drew people together for religious ceremony.

To feed this population, local groups pooled their labor to convert natural wetlands into highly productive raised fields by digging a network of drainage canals and piling the fertile soils onto raised planting platforms. The whole system eventually failed. Monumental constructions ceased, raised fields were no longer maintained, and people either migrated elsewhere or disbanded to live in smaller, self-sustained farmsteads.

These types of collective arrangements remain imperative today as government agricultural subsidies and support programs, as well as farmer co-ops, have had varied successes and failures. The social and environmental conditions of agriculture continuously change due to climatic variability, erosion, soil fertility losses, and the willingness of individual farmers to cooperate both with each other and government institutions.

These uncertainties, which have plagued all agricultural societies since the earliest domesticates, cannot be easily projected into the future, so we turn to the long-term approach of archaeology. The region of study presents the complete cycle from intensification of agricultural infrastructure to its ultimate failure.

The project focuses on a case study where detailed satellite and aerial remote sensing has identified remains of ancient agricultural field systems. Coring and trenching in the raised fields will reveal construction techniques and duration of use with geochemical analysis to assess soil fertility. Samples from fields will be used to date their construction and abandonment, and to determine what crops were grown in these fields through macro- and micro-botanical analysis.

These data will be compared with that collected from survey and excavations as a means to reconstruct settlement history relative to raised field construction. Excavations will target households of different statuses to understand how wealth and power relationships changed over time. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions based on lagoon cores will model how the climate changed from the beginning to the end of this period of agricultural intensification.

Together, these data will present a picture of the social, political, religious, and environmental factors that fostered an era of cooperation that led to the development of an intensive agricultural system and levels of monumentality not seen before in this region. Perhaps more importantly, the project will uncover the reasons why such collective action ceased.

Regardless of the differences in scale and technology, this case shares many of the same social, political, and environmental concerns with our modern farming systems.

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.