Doctoral Dissertation Research: Adaptation to a Varying Coastal Environment

This project explores human-environmental adaptation on a barrier island with a well-documented longitudinal settlement history, a long history of archaeological research, and easily accessible curated archaeological materials as well as opportunities for collecting and analyzing environmental data. This research aids understanding of the nature of human-environment interaction, and presents a novel combination of archaeological, ecological, and statistical methods for addressing questions within this sphere of research. In addition to training a graduate student, the project serves as an instructional guide for training students and researchers at all academic levels in specialized techniques for environmental analysis. This doctoral dissertation research project asks how human settlement of barrier islands have changed over the course of its occupation. Specifically, how did human action change the barrier island landscape and its vegetational communities? The researchers utilize a cross-disciplinary methodology that combines traditional archaeological techniques with paleoenvironmental modeling and Bayesian statistical analysis. Charcoal quantification is used to examine fire prevalence over a 3000-year span of time, denoting both changes in natural fire regimes because of change in the environment, as well as human intervention in the utilization of fire for a broad array of cultural purposes. Pollen analysis is performed for the same span of time to observe changes in the local vegetation patterns, which will further reflect changes to environmental conditions as the local ecology responds to long-term fluctuations caused by both natural and cultural processes. This suite of techniques provides a novel framework through which archaeologists can posit and test hypotheses to better understand the dynamics of human-environment interaction. 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.