Collaborative Research: Long Term Relationship between Climate Change and Agricultural Response

Human interactions with plants and animals on dynamic and integrated natural and cultural landscapes, have provided the agrarian foundation for civilization. Agrarian responses to environmental flux depend on complex human interactions with the landscape, water management, and choices in plant and animal management, especially in environmentally fragile ecosystems.

This project investigates how human civilizations respond, both successfully and unsuccessfully, to pronounced environmental changes. Specifically, this research illuminates the often-precarious relationships between agrarian societies, and their ecological settings over the long term. Profound environmental stress about four thousand years ago has been linked with major societal disruptions across the ancient world.

Today, some ecosystems are warming almost twice as fast as the global average, and water demand is expected to double or triple in the next few decades, which will continue to stress already-vulnerable ecosystems, economies, and societies. With the dynamic sensitivity under consideration this investigation of social decision making and agrarian responses to environmental stress in the deep past potentially reveals fundamental implications for human resilience and sustainable agriculture in the present and the future.

This project is an interdisciplinary study integrating social and natural scientists. Such studies are particularly well-suited to applying deep time perspectives to elucidate long-term environmental changes and assess how agricultural communities cope with environmental stress. Communication of project results will be facilitated by archaeologically informed artistic depictions of ancient landscapes and agrarian communities.

Outreach to popular and university audiences in the United States and beyond will foster a sense of archaeological stewardship, an appreciation of deep human heritage, and an awareness of the varied responses to environmental change implemented by agrarian societies. Project data will be accessioned into the University of California’s Digital Library Merritt repository, where it will be managed by Open Context, and available for broad audiences to investigate agricultural practices during the rise and collapse of ancient civilizations.

Project results contribute a new comparative approach for the study of ancient social flux across broad geographic and temporal scales, while offering opportunities for student and popular engagement in scientific research.

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.