This project investigates past human adaptations to tropical forests and the environmental impacts of past land-use strategies. Tropical forests are regularly dismissed as fragile landscapes, providing inadequate resources to sustain large populations without substantial modification. Yet long-surviving traditional food-production practices, involving sophisticated understandings of forest ecology and the benefits of managing vegetation for land cover, suggest that populations developed sustainable methods to support themselves over millennia of interactions with their environment. This project examines past settlement remains and environmental proxy data to assess interpretations of land use, sustainability, and adaptations to tropical forests. It will identify potentially sustainable agricultural practices from the past that can inform future development programs and policies. Long term land-management is essential in the contemporary tropics, which have endured extreme changes from deforestation and are projected to host the highest levels of future population growth. The project will provide opportunities for students, professional colleagues, and volunteers to engage in the research. Investigators will expand local networks and partnerships by coordinating activities with community-based organizations, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations to promote greater scientific knowledge of long term tropical lowland ecology. New data generated by this project will be available to aid in planning projects for education and development.
The team will examine how a past society created and sustained dense settlements and a farming system that flourished in the tropical forest. The occupants built monumental centers and large populations once inhabited a tropical environment considered marginal today. Many archaeologists believe that growing populations in tropical regions have outstripped the ability of the forest to sustain them, creating conditions of environmental vulnerability that lead to ?collapse.? Yet in some cases populations increased steadily for centuries and the composition of the contemporary forest indicates long-term management, raising the possibility that traditional adaptations to the forest were sustainable. The research team, comprising archaeologists, botanists, geographers, palynologists, and soil scientists, will examine data to address this question. Archaeological and environmental data derived from field survey, remotely sensed Lidar imagery, soil and lake cores, and modern vegetation assessment will be integrated into a Geographic Information Systems to build models of agricultural land suitability and human environmental impacts.
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.
