Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Examination of Long Term Environmental Impact of Grazing

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Research topics on environmental change and degradation span multiple scholarly disciplines and speak to varying concerns across different populations and audiences. Archaeological research plays an important role in conversations on environmental change as it can investigate human-environmental interactions across greater time scales and provide important insight on the ways society, politics, and economy both shape and are shaped by the environment. Looking at prehistoric and early historic time periods, this project uses an archaeological approach to investigate how histories of animal husbandry, agricultural production, and political economy intersected to produce complex environmental histories. Investigating specific articulations between human activities and changes in the environmental record at deeper time scales will ultimately provide a stronger empirical context to guide public and scholarly debate as well as inform environmental conservation policies. Under the direction of Dr. Kathleen Morrison, Co-PI Kelly Wilcox Black will conduct faunal and dental microwear analysis on animal remains from an archaeological site located in South India (Kadebakele, Karnataka India). The researcher will combine faunal and dental microwear datasets with vegetation and remote sensing data in order to investigate whether and under what circumstances, intensified forms of land and animal use corresponded with deforestation, overgrazing, and soil erosion. This case study will specifically examine questions related to shifts in resource production strategies and their environmental impacts over the course of the Neolithic, Iron Age, and Early Historic periods in South India. This particular temporal context is important because it captures a diverse set of social and economic practices, including the beginnings of animal domestication in the region, as well as the subsequent emergence of towns and urban economies. An empirically informed study concerning the relationship between different modes of political economy, resource production, and changes in vegetation, soils, and landforms will be specifically relevant to contemporary environment conservation programs in South Asia. Such programs depict processes such has pastoralism and animal grazing as inherently environmentally destructive despite the fact that the long-term impacts of grazing are poorly understood. The results from this research will provide a much-needed long-term perspective on the impacts of intensified agricultural production and livestock grazing and will critically evaluate how the empirical evidence can be read against the assumptions and ideologies that are built into existing conservation programs. Although this example is specific to the environmental concerns and policies existing in South Asia, the analytical framework provided can be replicated in other regions and provide insight into present day global environmental concerns. Importantly, this research will use archaeological evidence not only to help illustrate the complexity underlying human-environmental interactions over time, but to also reconstruct how populations in the past perceived episodes of environmental stress and how they responded to them, offering new and diverse perspectives into how to cope with and potentially remedy particular forms of environmental degradation.