Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Effects of Environmental Change on Fish Ecology

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

Jonathan Dombrosky and Dr. Emily Lena Jones of the University of New Mexico, will research the impact of a changing environment on the incorporation of new foods into human diets. This project helps develop archaeologically visible indicators of when a food type recovered in relatively low abundance might relate to human nutritional demands. In the American Southwest, it has long been assumed that fish were unimportant in the diet of Ancestral Pueblo groups. Yet, small numbers of fish remains are consistently recovered from late prehispanic archaeological sites in New Mexico, and they are rare during earlier time periods. The end of drought conditions may have impacted how people made different decisions about the foods they ate. In addition, prehispanic fishing in desert ecosystems is of interest to both archaeologists and ecologists. Understanding more about the ecology of prehispanic fish communities will provide a new source of paleoenvironmental information in a region where fish remains are thought to be insignificant. Desert streams are of critical conservation concern given modern anthropogenic impacts and current drought forecasts. The results of this project will be of interest not only to scholars, but to agencies charged with the management of plants and animals in desert ecosystems. This research will also support the work of a young scholar earning his PhD and will provide hands-on training and funding for one undergraduate research assistant. Dombrosky, under the supervision of Dr. Jones, will use theory rooted in behavioral ecology to understand how fishing might have become an optimal food-getting strategy for Ancestral Pueblo farmers. Three lines of evidence will test this question: 1) radiocarbon dates of fish bones, to establish the timing and tempo of fishing; 2) body size estimations of fishes from archaeological sites, to assess whether they were unusually large; and 3) analysis of the stable isotopic composition of fish bones recovered from these sites, to determine if fishes had more variable diets during the late prehispanic period. 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.