Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Settlement Transformation and Resilience

Tulane University, New Orleans LA

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers across the social and environmental sciences are intensely interested in understanding how complex societies respond to environmental change, and narratives drawn from archaeology are central to the way researchers and the general public think about this topic. Most such narratives about how past human societies have dealt with environmental change conflate political stability with social stability, assuming that if a political entity survives it means that the society has successfully adapted. But the interests of polities and of the individual communities they administer do not always align, and maintaining political stability in a rapidly changing world comes at the cost of at least some political subjects who must bear the costs of "adaptation." Luke Auld-Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University, will conduct archaeological research under the supervision of Dr. Marcello A. Canuto to investigate the reorganization of communities in the hinterlands of El Achiotal, an ancient Maya polity that survived a period of severe environmental change with its political institutions intact. This project advances understanding of the processes that occur within polities beset by environmental change, asking whether political stability in the context of environmental duress is underwritten by the reorganization of other aspects of social life. Such considerations are fundamental as the contemporary world absorbs the effects of environmental change and policymakers grapple with how to distribute the costs of maintaining social and/or political stability, and this research will shed light on the internal social transformations that allow polities to endure. Moreover, the research location in northwestern Guatemala is an area under extreme environmental and political pressure tied to narcotics trafficking, illegal ranging, and deforestation, and the project plays a stabilizing role by helping to strengthen local stakeholder institutions with an interest in maintaining the forest and building legal and sustainable livelihoods, specifically archaeological tourism. The project will train Guatemalan undergraduate students in the use of remote sensing technology in archaeology, increasing local capacity for documenting and preserving cultural heritage resources. Mr. Auld-Thomas will utilize airborne laser scanning (lidar) to rapidly document the distribution of archaeological features underneath forest canopy, which allows researchers to move directly to targeted excavations instead of spending years locating archaeological remains through traditional ground survey. The project develops a rigorous methodology for rapid, lidar-assisted settlement survey and excavation that is easily adaptable to other forested regions, ultimately allowing archaeological research in these areas to proceed more efficiently in terms of both time and funding. Through test excavations of a large sample of both residential and public buildings (totaling about 50 sampled buildings) distributed across four intensively-surveyed ~1km2 settlement zones around El Achiotal, this project will document changes in where people lived and in the types of settlements they inhabited through time, allowing for a reconstruction of broad-scale social changes in the hinterlands of the El Achiotal polity as it coped with a changing landscape. 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.