Dr. Kathryn Weedman Arthur of the University of South Florida, along with colleagues from the United States, Italy, France, and Ethiopia will explore how humans modified their environment and social practices in the aftermath of inflicted disasters. Importantly, the team proposes to study the historical impacts of human conflict on forests and the extent and type of human conservation practiced during and after conflict. Forests are critical resources for stabilizing soils for surrounding agriculture and providing timber, paper, fuel-wood, clean air, and biomedicine among other resources. Archaeology is particularly suited to offer past solutions for how people successfully conserved or rebuilt essential forest landscapes. This study expects to construct a model relevant today to the peoples of the African continent, as well as the United States in mitigating future climate and socio-economic vulnerabilities to forested environments. The International team wishes to foster intellectual exchange for problem solving between scientists of different nations and offer educational and skill training for several US graduate students in archaeology and environmental studies.
Dr. Arthur and her research team propose to study how and if people are able to recuperate their landscape in the aftermath of immense conflict and tragedy, such as that created by the historic Atlantic and Red Sea slave trades. The project proposes to study more than two-hundred forests that surround historic settlements that date from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries AD in southern Ethiopia'a region northern and eastern states raided for the slave trade. Scholars debate over whether these forests represent pristine "natural" environments preserved through historic conservation efforts in resistance to outside political change or if the forests represent change in practices to provide social-political and environmental resilience for the future after conflict. With Dr. Arthur?s leadership, her team plans for small scale testing of the forests to retrieve soil samples and artifacts, to date and reconstruct the environmental and cultural history of the forests. The team also intends to conduct an environmental assessment and map the living forests, as well as core sample the highland springs to obtain historic pollen for environmental reconstruction. The team anticipates the construction of a model outlining the relationship between the past and present cultural and environmental factors examining how people living on the borderlands of states are able to resist or be resilient to conflict through forest conservation.
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.
