Investigating High-Elevation Mobility

Stoll, Marijke M, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Stacie King at Indiana-University-Bloomington, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating past and present human mobility in high-elevation mountain environments. Researchers increasingly use Least-Cost Path (LCP) analyses in Geographic Information Systems-based computer software (GIS) to model how individuals move over different types of landscape terrains. However, problems arise when these analytical techniques are applied to high-elevation mountain environments because first, they derive from principles of hydrology; and second, they assume that people avoid steep slopes because of high energetic or caloric costs (Balstrøm 2002; Whitley and Hicks 2003). The intense occupation of the hilltops, ridgelines, and slopes of high-elevation mountain environments around the world both in the past and the present demonstrates that people will regularly traverse high energy-cost terrain, especially when they have to access food, water and other needed resources, and/or when travel over easier, less costly terrain (in terms of energy or calories) is/was impossible for sociopolitical reasons. Ethnographic and spatial data, combined with archaeological survey of ancient footpaths between known archaeological sites, will be used to refine LCP analyses in GIS and improve research into past and present human mobility in high-elevation mountain environments. This project will collaborate with local communities to record both individual and communal landscape narratives, creating a holistic view of how people experience high-elevation mountain environments. To better account for the way people who live(d) in mountainous regions actually move(d) through them, a three-phase research strategy is employed that combines archival and historical research, semi-structured ethnographic interviews, and a GPS survey of the mountain trail(s) connecting a large-scale, high-elevation archaeological site and a nearby modern village where archaeological structures have previously been reported (Rickards 1910). The project will document and digitally audio-record interlocutor knowledge and experiences of the local landscape while also collecting key information such as direction, elevation, changing slope grades, and the length in time and distance using a Trimble GPS unit with sub-meter accuracy. Data from the ethnographic interviews and GPS surveys together will be analyzed with the aim of refining LCP analytical techniques and modeling when applied to high-elevation mountain environments in GIS. 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.