Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Technological Response To Environmental Variation

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Mica Jones, PhD Candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will investigate how hunter-gatherer lifeways change and have diversified through time in response to large-scale climatic and environmental fluctuations. Scholars of non-food producing societies have noted close ties between resource availability and the organization of forager societies. In temperate regions, change among hunter-gatherers is often related to shifts in the amount of wild foods available during the year. In areas like the African tropics where resources do not vary significantly from season to season, climatic oscillations over hundreds or thousands of years are more important drivers of social and economic change in small scale human societies. The ways that broad shifts in climate patterns affect social strategies employed by people relying on wild resources in the tropics, however, are not well understood. The deep time perspective of archaeology provides a useful lens for investigating such shifts over long periods of time. This study will use archaeological data to examine the ways small-scale, non-food producing societies adapted to well-known climatic fluctuations over the last 20,000 years in eastern Africa. Findings will provide new information on the role that hunter-gatherer social flexibility had in shaping the social diversity of prehistoric eastern Africa. This doctoral dissertation research project will also further MS Jones academic and intellectual development. Mr. Jones will examine changing hunter-gatherer behavior in two distinct eastern African contexts: the wet, productive Lake Victoria basin of eastern Uganda and the more climatically-sensitive semi-arid plains of southern Somalia. By comparing wet and dry case studies, this research aims to understand how local environmental conditions influence hunter-gatherer decision-making when faced with ecological change. Using zooarchaeological and isotopic analyses, this study will examine changing hunting and site-use strategies as well as local rainfall patterns to track correlations in forager lifeways and environmental changes. In doing so, it will help fill an ever-widening data hole in a geographically important and politically sensitive part of the Horn of Africa today by providing new information on the long-term presence of people in prehistoric southern Somalia. 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.