Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Agriculture in the Development of Social Complexity.

This doctoral dissertation project uses archaeobotany, the study of plant remains from archaeological sites, to examine the relationship between agricultural practices, the environment, and human/social factors during the Iron Age. Societies during that time period frequently relied on agricultural crops and associated plants to produce food, fodder, and fuel for day-to-day living.

Plant remains recovered from archaeological sites are well suited to investigating social-environmental interactions because plants simultaneously rely on social and environmental input to survive and propagate. Plant remains can be used to understand the impact of different factors on agricultural production, including environmental variables like rainfall and soil fertility, and social practices like crop harvesting, labor coordination, and taxation.

Previous scholarship on social-environmental interactions during this time has often inferred localized agricultural practices from indirect evidence like ceramics, architecture, and settlement patterns. This research uses direct observations of plant remains to examine both local and regional patterns, integrating data with existing information to create a broad, regional understanding of plant-based agriculture throughout the period of study.

This research will educate undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in the scientific process through archaeological lab methods. The results of this project will be available through open access and contribute to two projects that foster global collaboration to study ancient state-level societies from a new perspective.

The researchers use plant remains to determine the agricultural practices of two contrasting Iron Age sites which are located in different environments. It works to answer the central question of how agricultural practices in state-level societies were influenced by a complex interplay of environmental and social factors. This study combines quantitative analysis, stable isotope analysis, and radiocarbon dating of plant remains, alongside observation of dung spherulites, to evaluate the dynamic relative input of environmental and social factors on which agriculture was based and how this varied by location and through time.

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.