Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Long Term Environmental, Subsistence And Urbanization Interactions

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Ms. Alison Damick will undertake research on the emergence of urbanism and its relationship to technological and environmental change during the Early Bronze Age (c. 3200-2400 BCE) in coastal Lebanon. The development of urban societies is critical in human history. Urbanism continues to be a current dominant settlement trend, and involves especially intensive modes of environmental modification and stress. The fluctuations of urban societies have often been attributed to climate variability, the over-exploitation of agricultural and natural resources, and the ability of humans to respond to such challenges. Archaeology is ideally positioned to examine these processes because it traces long-term impacts of different modes of environmental modification and resource use over the entire course of past climate change events, and generates models for more or less effective strategies in different contexts. This research will produce data that is relevant to widespread contemporary concerns, (in the United States and beyond), where a wide variety of environments, urban infrastructures, and technologies must be mobilized to address national strategies for coping with a changing climate. It is also relevant in areas in which there are globally invested development interests, such as Africa or the Middle East, where policies for engaging with often de-centralized urban systems require models for understanding alternative urban strategies for coping with local needs. This research investigates the ways in which urban systems of the past in Lebanon, and their attendant environmental technologies, provide insight into diverse strategies that allowed for settlement rejuvenation within very small timespans. This will generate new insight into urban resilience, which has direct implications for international development policies. This project also directly contributes to collaborative training programs and international comparative research by providing training opportunities for Lebanese and international students and the first microbotanical reference collections for the Archaeology program at AUB. For this project, Ms. Damick will examine changes in plant use and processing technologies over the course of early urbanization at two sites in coastal Lebanon. The early urban settlements of Lebanon are much smaller than in neighboring areas, and show evidence for periodic expansion and contraction throughout their occupation history; however, they appear to have been less vulnerable to the broader regional de-urbanization movements of the "4.2k arid event" than the settlements of neighboring areas. This research uses a close analysis of the microbotanical and ground stone tool evidence from Tell Fadous-Kfarabida (TFK) in the north and Sidon in the south, to reconstruct and compare plant production and processing over the course of urbanization in one of the least understood areas of the Levant. Through an analysis of grinding tool use wear and microbotanical evidence, contextualized within regional palaeoenvironmental and site-specific occupation records, Ms. Damick will develop a comparative model for how these small-scale early urban societies reacted to climate variability in relation to their micro-environments and their geo-political orientations. This research is crucial for understanding the emergence of social complexity in the Levantine EBA, and for global comparative approaches to environmental resource management in volatile, diverse environments.