Long Term Agrarian Responses to Environmental Stress

This project addresses basic social and environmental questions regarding the development of agrarian societies, and the social and physical landscapes they engendered and in which modern societies continue to live. Interdisciplinary studies featuring collaboration between archaeologists, geographers and earth scientists are particularly well-suited to apply deep time perspectives to elucidate long-term environmental changes, and assess how past societies responded to environmental stress, with attendant implications for modern societies.

In particular, illumination of the possible trajectories and potential impacts of past environmental change holds major implications for understanding how and why urban civilizations rose and collapsed. Accordingly, this research illuminates the often-precarious relationships between agrarian societies, both past and modern, and their ecological settings.

The project’s principal researchers include nine early career scholars, four of whom are women, including two of Hispanic descent. Project outreach to popular and university audiences in the US and beyond will foster a sense of cultural stewardship, an appreciation of deep human heritage, and an awareness of the varied responses to environmental change implemented by past agrarian societies.

Project data will be accessioned into the University of California’s Digital Library (CDL) Merritt repository, where it will be managed by Open Context, and available for broad audiences to investigate the interactions of environmental change and agrarian responses. This project will contribute a new comparative approach for the study of ancient social flux while offering opportunities for student engagement in scientific research.

This research will contribute to the growing discussion of environmental dynamics at the heart of past social change with timely pertinence for human responses to environmental change in the modern world. The researchers will elucidate multi-millenial trajectories of environmental change and varied paths of human response during a period of pronounced societal upheaval.

Coordinated analyses of stable isotopes from archaeological crop seeds, and animal bones and teeth will be used to estimate ancient rainfall and temperatures through time. Changing profiles of cultivated crops and herded animals will portray shifting human responses to environmental change.

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.