The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support an eighteen month research fellowship by Dr. Andrew Ugan to work with Dr. Adolfo Gil at the Museo de Historia Natural Antropologia in Argentina.
The introduction of agriculture dramatically changed human health and demography and carried profound implications for interactions between farming and non-farming peoples worldwide. While corn macrofossils and enrichment of 13C isotopes in prehistoric human bone suggest farming was introduced to southern Mendoza, Argentina some 2,000 years ago, the presence of wild resources with isotopic signals similar to corn render the data equivocal. To help clarify this problem, the investigators will sample the carbon and nitrogen isotope signature of 53 wild plant and animal taxa along a transect between the Monte Desert and Andean Cordillera. The data will be used to calculate their dietary contributions to a sample of human remains from the same region and better characterize the relative importance of wild resources in prehistoric diets. The long-term goal is to resolve the role of corn agriculture in shaping prehistoric economies and farmer-forager interactions in western Argentina, compare and contrast developments there with a similar situation in the eastern Great Basin of the United States, and thereby improve our understanding of prehistoric behavior in both regions. In addition to speaking to an important question, this research adds substantially to our knowledge of the region, doubling the data on prehistoric human isotope chemistry and increasing samples of edible plants and animals even more. Those data will interest researchers studying human health and subsistence in nearby regions and researchers in other fields studying the isotope chemistry and ecology of non-human taxa. This project will establish bilateral opportunities for continuing research and study in both countries and will provide comparative data critical to understanding prehistoric adaptations to arid environments in both western Argentina and the western United States.
