Socioecological System Dynamics and the Emergence of Inequality

This award was provided as part of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Simon Brewer at the University of Utah, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the environmental and social interactions that drive material inequality in the inter-mountain west of North America. This project will help develop a joint geographical and anthropological research program evaluating how environmental change and human economic decisions influence each other to impact resource inequality among humans.

Two key longstanding social science questions are investigated here: 1) what drivers of material inequality are most influential and 2) given that inequality is a complex system, how can we effectively evaluate the importance of drivers over space and time. Answering these questions helps inform us about how severe inequality came to be and predict how it may change in the future.

By applying new techniques, informed by existing theory, linking archaeological and paleo-environmental data this research will provide new, replicable, approaches to understanding the relative importance of causes for inequality that may be applied around the world and used for future prediction.

While inequality is multi-causal, much research has linked economic intensification, expending greater effort to obtain more returns from the same spatial area, and privatization with increasing inequality. However, intensification and privatization themselves are multi-causal, influenced by the interactions between the environment and human population size.

Via implementation of a series of novel sub-models within an Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) simulation approach, this research addresses these complexities by generating quantitative, empirical evaluations of how the interactions of environmental change and productivity, population density, subsistence economy intensification (SEI), and privatization influence the emergence of material inequality within a dynamic system. Crucially, this work will estimate which causes have the greatest impact on inequality, providing guidance for future research.

Employing four case studies, this project also generates new cross-comparative data on inequality, SEI, and the scope of privatization within the inter-mountain west of North America. This new data will be freely available to future researchers and capable of contributing to research on not only the emergence of inequality but also on territoriality, settlement, conflict, dietary change, the impacts of environmental change, and more.

Further, this project will a) provision new, replicable, methods for understanding environmental and social factor influences on SEI, privatization, and inequality, and b) advance methods to push the study of inequality beyond current limitations. This research will also train one postdoctoral fellow in advanced quantitative analysis and paleoenvironmental modeling, furthering his pursuit of a tenure-track position.

This work will also recruit students who are underrepresented in STEM to provide data collection and analysis training, introduction to the archaeology and paleoclimate of the project area, and opportunities for student research projects. To reach a broader public, project results will be shared through the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) via presentations and interactive Scientist in the Spotlight programs as well as turned into a teaching toolkit for the NHMU.

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.