Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Human Subsistance Practices And Environmental Change - A Botanical Analysis

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers at The Ohio State University, will investigate how incorporating animal domesticates into a foraging base impacts the development of vegetation communities in arid regions. This research project will build on what is understood of agricultural origins by expanding knowledge of food production's implementation in marginal zones beyond sedentary villages. The project data will contribute to a broader effort to understand how ancient human groups created the conditions in which agriculture became the dominant, and eventually exclusive, economic practice across many regions of the world. By setting this particular research in this broader context of human niche construction, the place of pastoralists in the world, both contemporary and past, is reframed. Instead of overexploitation narratives (which characterize much contemporary development literature), pastoralist landscape development and management are viewed as potential innovations and adaptations to new environs which were previously unsuitable to significant population levels. To understand the relationship between food production and local climate on a global scale, pastoralists and their evolutionary landscapes require careful consideration. Co-PI Abigail Buffington will examine the relationship between the anthropogenic activities of landscape management and the ecology of the broader region of Wadi Sana in the Hadramawt state of southeastern Yemen. This region is today effectively closed to new research projects due to political instability but likely was a significant conduit between regions in prehistory. Domestics from the Levant, South Asia and East Africa eventually became foundational foods in the later agricultural economies of the region. The earliest animal domesticates in Southern Arabia have been recovered from these contexts, as well as evidence of a locally, emergent pastoral economy and very early experiments in vegetation burning and water management. The climatic history of the region provided a beneficial preservation of the sediments in which dating of these discrete phases can be determined. Phytolith assemblages - the microscopic silica deposits that accumulate when plants decay - extracted from these sediments, will be used as signatures of the local plant ecology associated with these niche constructing activities. While this project aims to understand these phytolith groupings as entire entities, there is a possibility that the initial evidence of plant domesticates may be recovered in the course of this study.