Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Sustainable Agricultural Practices

The goal of this project is to examine the sustainability of past agricultural systems and the long-term impacts of these activities on the local environment. As population drastically increases and societies struggle to increase food production in turn, simply expanding existing agriculture systems will not be enough to meet demands. It is necessary to investigate alternative options that are designed for long-term persistence and resilience.

This includes not only technological innovation, but the social mechanisms that cause the continued use of agricultural systems, leading to sustainability. Few agricultural studies have the time-depth necessary to test assumptions of sustainability, yet this is essential to the responsible management of agricultural landscapes. Archaeology is uniquely well-suited to addressing these questions through study of the entire lifespan of a system, and the ability to look at specific instances of agricultural success and failure.

Past humans found ways to cultivate many diverse landscapes, and this knowledge will be increasingly vital as aridification and waning soil quality decrease the amount of available fertile land.

This project will investigate the environmental and social conditions surrounding the construction and cultivation of non-traditional agricultural systems. Focus will be placed on the feasibility of these approaches for modern implementation by examining specific local conditions that contributed to past agricultural success or failure. One long term prehistoric system will be studied.

Through the integration of soil analyses, subsurface geophysics, and remote sensing, this dataset will allow for multiscalar analyses of these ancient agricultural systems. This data will be used to determine what motivated the creation of raised fields, whether they were managed locally or through state-level organization, and how these landscape modifications affected long-term soil properties.

This research is designed to differentiate soil conditions that represent ancient human activity from recent processes, a distinction needed in archaeological studies. The integration of multi-sensor geophysical methods used here has the potential to advance remote sensing approaches, and a new method of low-cost thermal imagery for agricultural applications is proposed.

This dataset will contribute to knowledge of food security in arid coastal environments and help to understand how similar environments can be effectively cultivated in the future.

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.