Doctoral Dissertation Research: Human Biological Affects of Climate Change

No longer a looming threat, climate change is an active and ongoing crisis, with desertification depleting access to arable land and sea-level rise threatening coastal communities around the world. Studies of living populations, although valuable, present a limited view of the range of possible human adaptations to environmental shifts. Archaeological research provides a means of investigating the diverse ways that human societies have responded to climatological changes through time.

Thus, the driving research focus of this project will be to enhance understanding of the range of human responses to environmental and sociopolitical change. The majority of archaeological research on periods of major climate or sociopolitical change tend to fall in either one of two camps: scholars arguing for sociopolitical collapse as a form of failure to respond to an external or internal stressor, and scholars arguing against this position.

Interestingly, scholars in both camps tend to focus on the time period immediately surrounding the event in question, and until recently almost exclusively on the before and during. More rarely do scholars ask what happened in the decades and centuries afterwards.

In this doctoral dissertation project the student will use bioarchaeological methods to investigate the way people managed and adapted to changing environmental conditions in the past. Bioarchaeology, the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites, provides a means of reconstructing certain aspects about the lives of past-peoples. This research focuses on a desert based archaeological site.

It focuses on a large cemetery site used from the 13th to 15th centuries. This coincides with the Medieval Climate Anomaly, a period of intense climate change and drought in the much of the world. Bioarchaeological and chemical analyses of human remains allow researchers to reconstruct the dietary patterns, disease load, and presence of violence within this population, providing a window into climate change adaptation.

The results provide a foundation on which studies for multiple regions can be compared. The research enhances international collaboration and exchange of ideas between archaeologists of multiple countries. Laboratory work creates and enhances educational and training opportunities for university students.

This project adds to scientific knowledge about how people adapt to and recover from environmental shifts, providing policy makers with a greater capacity to craft scientifically informed policy.

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.