9318952 Stone This project supports the historical ecological research of several anthropologists studying how two peasant farming populations exploited a previously unsettled land area of Nigeria. Using images from remote satellites to document changes in land use, maps, censuses, and detailed ethnographic studies of labor inputs to farming by peasant households, the project will compare the different historical effects of culturally distinctive patterns of land exploitation by two groups. Specific questions to be asked include analyzing the differences between the two groups in their propensity to intensify production and to abandon through land exhaustion different areas. This research is important because land degradation is a critical problem in many areas of the world, and the solutions to the problems are not simply technological. We must understand local models of how people use land in order to understand why some groups maintain and conserve land resources and others exhaust them. This sort of intensive comparison will provide new ideas on how traditional peoples exploit their agricultural land. ***
