Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Coastal Resources

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation project is to understand how changes in resource densities and distribution across landscapes impacted subsistence strategies, mobility, and social connectivity of foraging communities. Researchers previously noted that large-scale environmental shifts impacted floral and faunal communities, which likely influenced human social organization by changing resource distributions and the distances between them. Coastal communities are particularly sensitive to such shifts, as environmental changes may submerge or expose large sections of land. An archaeological investigation can address such considerations as the extended timescales capture repeated restructuring of resource distribution and density. Within this broader context, this project considers the impacts of coastal shifts on nutrient-rich resources, and asks whether foraging communities responded by expanding or contracting their social networks. This research addresses larger questions about human response to changing resource distributions. The doctoral student plans to use materials collected from coastal archaeological sites along a modern coastline and one in the hinterland, to better assess how forager subsistence strategies, mobility, and social connectivity were impacted across time and space. Previous research demonstrated that this area was subjected to multiple climatic events where the coastline expanded and contracted, offering a unique ability to situate these materials within a broader context. This project uses ostrich eggs to inform multiple dimensions of forager life: subsistence (eggs as food), technology (eggs as water containers), and social connections (flasks and beads as trade items). Investigators plan to analyze the eggshell surfaces, chemistry, and organic components, and present a model for using ostrich eggshell fragments more broadly to tackle questions of subsistence and mobility. By examining how foragers used ostrich eggs, a better understanding of responses to changes in resource distributions can be determined, as can an assessment of how this response changed over multiple climate cycles that had clear impacts on coastline resources. 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.