Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Effect of Environment Change in Settlement Occupation and Abandonment

This award permits a doctoral dissertation student conduct environmental archaeological research to understand how people interacted with their local environments in a wetland setting. Previous studies have often linked the rise and fall of societies to improvements and deterioration in climatic patterns. Understanding these issues is critical as climate change affects countries worldwide in modern times.

However, these studies tend to underestimate human and social resilience to climatic and environmental changes due to the lack of localized, fine-grained data. In this regard, environmental archaeology is particularly enlightening since it involves the collection and interpretation of environmental data in close proximity (both geographically and temporally) to archaeological discoveries.

In sensitive and fragile environments such as wetlands, climate change reshapes the landscape even by a small fluctuation of precipitation and temperature. From the long-term perspective of archaeology, people adapted to the new environments through technological innovation and food diversification. This human adaptation also causes environmental consequences.

This project sheds light on the complex feedback loop between human adaptation, environmental consequences, and the long-term sustainability of human-environmental interactions. The researchers aim to facilitate knowledge exchange between themselves and today's residents, deepening their understanding of managing the local environments and promoting environmental sustainability.

The student investigates how human behavior and settlements evolved with changing environments, particularly the fluctuating lake levels in one study area. The archaeological site is located on the edge of a highland lake, and it is one of the earliest human settlements in the region. The site was continuously occupied for over a millennium, between ~3600 and 2300 cal.

BP, providing a unique opportunity to explore environmental changes before, during, and after human occupation. Due to active sedimentation and tectonic activities in the study area, archaeological deposits are buried deeply underground. To reconstruct the environmental conditions, the researchers use coring to retrieve soil samples from the past and analyze them in the laboratory.

By comparing the environmental data with findings within the site, the researchers can distinguish whether changes were induced by human or climatic events and whether the changes were significant enough to render the site uninhabitable. This research fills in the gap of environmental archaeology in this part of the world.

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.