SBE-UKRI: Collaborative Research: The Role of Environment in Social Transformation

Archaeologists have studied societal collapse, working to unravel the multiple social, political, and environmental factors that contributed to the breakdown of long term political systems. Yet, major questions remain unanswered. Interdisciplinary research has postulated that potentially severe drought episodes may play an important role in this process.

Despite the strong patterns in the paleoclimate record, it is less clear how elite and non-elite populations responded to the impacts of drought. Research has demonstrated that the collapse can be varied with the timing of abandonment different across geographic regions likely representing distinct decision-making processes of populations for each site.

In some cases settlements are able to persist through several droughts although the mechanisms of that survival are not well-understood. These issues are relevant to current climate challenges, as past patterns may serve as lessons from past societies that successfully or unsuccessfully adapted to the impacts of climate. This award will further international collaboration and further training of students.

This project will identify the human responses to climatic challenges in a way that moves beyond the simple narrative of 'drought caused collapse' to determine what adaptation strategies were adopted as a population faced climate instability. To get at the human responses to climate variation, the reseachers ask: How did a population change their land use strategies in the event of extreme drought?

How did they continue occupation following a collapse? Did they change how they farmed and lived? These questions will be addressed by examining the numbers and timing of burials to gauge how population sizes changed through time.

Artifacts and monumental construction will be assessed to understand how people decided to use their resources with respect to trade and construction episodes and how these changed with climate pressures. Environments will be reconstructed using geochemical and microfossil (pollen, charcoal and algal remains) signatures in lake sediments that archive the nature of the surrounding environments at the time they were deposited.

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.