Human Extreme Environment Adaptation

Archaeology provides key information on the development of human adaptive capacities and how environmental changes affected societies over millennia. This project investigates multiple archaeological sites located at high altitude. A principal goal is to determine the degree of resilience of small-scale foraging groups before the advent of pastoralism, agriculture, and complex civilizations.

In addition to contributing information on how small-scale societies can persist in challenging environments, the project builds research capacity through a formal collaboration between US and partner institutions. The senior team provides hands-on training in archaeological science methods in the field and laboratory for more than 10 graduate and undergraduate students.

Students and senior team members share the project’s results with academic and public audiences through lectures. Among the project’s broader impacts is the production of educational materials aimed at schoolchildren and the public, including an informative plaque for the site, a display case for the school containing 3D printed replicas of artifacts, and an illustrated printed booklet on the local archaeological sites and their significance.

Studying how humans affect and are affected by their environments is important for understanding the development of cultural and adaptive patterns as well as the modern configuration of inhabited landscapes. This project investigates early human ecology by targeting the earliest and longest-occupied archaeological sites known from one high altitude region.

At each site the team constructs detailed and high-resolution radiocarbon records of occupation and compares these with local paleoenvironmental records. This makes it possible to determine when humans first settled the region, whether occupation was sustained or was discontinuous, whether specific environmental changes may have impacted occupation, and how people responded and ultimately persisted in this region over thousands of years.

Addressing this last issue requires more than establishing presence vs absence of people in residential sites. Analysis of artifacts and plant and animal remains from these archaeological sites provide information on occupation intensity and behavioral patterns over time, including subsistence, mobility, technology, resource use, and social connections between distinct ecological zones.

The team addresses whether changes in these behavioral patterns coincided with environmental shifts. Together, these approaches reveal how past environmental changes affected people and how foraging societies in high mountain landscapes have dealt with environmental challenges over long time spans.

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.