Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Coastal Resource Stability and Human Subsistence Adaptation

The goal of this project is to examine how coastal human societies actively maintain ecosystem stability within estuarine-lagoon environments. This is a doctoral dissertation project which will permit the co Principal Investigator to obtain data for their dissertation thesis. Sustainable coastal resource exploitation is an important aspect of how human populations influence ecosystems, and is relevant on a global scale today as coastal economies are threatened by overexploitation, pollution, and other human-caused modifications.

The transition to agriculture occurred during a time with conditions analogous to those today, with changing environment, increasing population sizes, and substantial human migration. By understanding how past human societies created conditions of resource stability, not just instability, in estuarine-lagoon systems prior to the transition to agriculture, allows the identification of similar mechanisms for recreating or maintaining stability in present-day ecosystems.

The magnitude of human niche construction, or the process of human modification of the environment, has never been more extreme as it is at present and by using the archaeological record, niche construction processes and their long-term effects on resource availability can be identified.

This project will investigate human management of coastal resources, or niche construction, as a possible explanation for the delayed adoption of intensive agriculture. The archaeological data comes from ancient shell mound contexts.These shell mound sites are associated with, a group of coastal foragers who lived in the region during the Archaic period.

Using zooarchaeological fish remains, the investigators will test for two forms of coastal resource niche construction: increasing stability in the trophic structure of the fish population and changing the season of fish harvest. They will combine measures of fish diet and trophic level along with the season of fish harvest to understand how the society maintained coastal ecosystem stability prior to the transition to agriculture.

These data will expand the understanding of the variability in conditions leading up to the transition to agriculture, especially in coastal societies, and directly link archaeological data to that of present-day fish populations. This project will provide data of interest not only to archaeologists, but to the local coastal inhabitants and present-day ecologists, given its relevance to supporting present-day estuarine-lagoon environments within the context of changing environmental conditions and increased human fishing pressures.

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.