Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Integration and Culture Change

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The current climate crisis is a stark reminder of humanity’s shared history of dealing with climatic extremes. In archeological theory, climate change or natural disasters have been blamed for the collapse of civilizations. Equally common, however, are instances in which polities in the ancient world adapted to or circumvented climatic extremes. Learning how ancient people dealt with severe climate phenomena can inform current and future responses to such crises. Archaeology is exceptionally positioned to unearth the long record of mutual interactions between human cultural practices and their environments. This project will examine ancient human resilience to climatic extremes at the archaeological site directly affected by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. Since the mid-Holocene societies have experienced ENSO events that, when most powerful, transform ecological conditions, prompting heavy rainfall and flooding in some locations and severe drought in others. This project takes a community-engaged approach to excavation and analysis. Through hiring and training residents, distributing educational resources, offering recurring presentations at schools, and preparing cultural heritage exhibitions this project will provide long-term community benefits. In this way, archeological work will be made relevant to local people. This project aims to respect, record, and integrate Indigenous knowledge systems, broadening the vision of climate science to incorporate traditional and local knowledge. Focusing on an area directly affected by ENSO events, this research investigates three resilient ways in which people integrated ENSO-related changes into their social and ecological systems. First, in the local dimension residents had access to various ecological niches, including floodplain, ocean and desert environments.. Thus, ENSO events that disrupt traditional irrigation canals and maritime resources also offer opportunities in desert landscapes, prompting extensive biota growth. This raises the question of how people in the area took advantage of such fluctuations. In addition to differentially affecting ecological niches, ENSOs have varying impacts on neighboring coastal valleys. As a second adaptation to these events, this project tests for trade between groups of people inhabiting the coastal zone.Finally the region was a strategic forefront of maritime resources and likely participated in subsistence exchanges with people inhabiting higher, agriculturally-focused sites of the valley. ENSOs affect resource availability across the various altitudinally-determined ecological zones, so this project will also investigate coastal-highland resource exchanges as an ENSO-resilience strategy. In conclusion, this project will combine climate modeling and archaeological data from site levels before, during, and after significant ENSO events to explore local resilience and determine how patterns of exchange fluctuated as fundamental human adaptations to ENSO events. 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.