Collaborative Research: Long-Term Human Responses to Ecological Instability

Given its focus on extended temporal spans of human behavior, archaeology is particularly well suited to examine long-term trends in how communities devise both technological and social adjustments to threats to their stability, and how those strategies may culminate in large-scale population relocations. The research team will adopt the perspective of political ecology to compare and contrast how societies mediate broad transformations in their climatic and ecological surroundings through a process of locally-based decision-making.

The project will develop new methods for addressing deep time approaches to the study of environmental change and migration. Further, it will promote educational and training opportunities for Native American students and involve interpretive collaboration with Native American communities.

Collaborators from the University of Florida (Dr. Charles Cobb), the University of Mississippi (Dr. Edmond Boudreaux), the University of South Dakota (Dr.

Anthony Krus), and the Chickasaw Nation (Dr. Brad Lieb) will embark upon a multi-year archaeological study of the causes underlying an extensive population abandonment of mid-continental North America during the fifteenth century AD. This phenomenon, covering about 50,000 square miles, is popularly known as the "Vacant Quarter." Archaeological research elsewhere has shown that climatic factors commonly play a central role in large-scale regional depopulations, and recent evidence suggests that a series of severe multi-decadal droughts struck eastern North America in the AD 1300s and 1400s.

These droughts appear to have been the result of wide swings in precipitation caused by the period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Nevertheless, there is extreme variability in the ways in which societies adapt to environmental as well as social stresses. The project will involve a comparative study of a number of archaeological sites in two sub-regions, central Tennessee and northern Mississippi, in the larger abandoned region.

Both areas witnessed an apparent exodus of people about AD 1450. However, prior to that time, they had very different histories of occupation culturally and ecologically. The research team will combine excavations with ceramic sourcing analyses, subsistence studies, and examinations of conflict to address similarities and differences in population movement, foodways, and warfare in the two study areas resulting from deterioration in their ecological and social surroundings, and how these processes ultimately led to contemporaneous mass migrations.

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.