Elizabeth Minor
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Social Science
How did early communities survive as water ran short and demands from regional trade grew? This archaeology project studies an ancient community during a period of early state formation.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
archaeology
early state formation
climate change
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Reconstruct how an ancient community adjusted agriculture, animal husbandry, craft production and trade as water resources declined, using settlement archaeology and analysis of plant and animal remains.
- Model past environmental and water conditions with geoarchaeological and hydro-archaeological methods, and relate them to architectural change and pottery exchange.
- Involve modern neighboring communities, especially local women, through input meetings, ethnographic interviews and shared interpretation of the archaeological results.
More about the research
It asks how people reshaped their social ties and food production to cope with an increasingly dry climate and economic pressure. Rather than treating people as passively adapting, the work focuses on their active choices to cooperate or compete, and on how those choices affected their survival.
Why it matters
The work could show how communities facing drying climates and economic pressure organized themselves to survive. That evidence is relevant to present-day discussions of climate resilience. Open-access data will let archaeologists compare regions, and the project's community-based methods may serve as a model for including local stakeholders, especially women, elsewhere.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kurt Rademaker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Social Science
Build high-resolution radiocarbon chronologies at the earliest and longest-occupied high-altitude sites to determine when people first settled the region and whether occupation was continuous or broken.
Francois Lanoe
University of Arkansas, AR·Social Science
Reconstruct subsistence economies at Broken Mammoth over time, including diet breadth and seasonal land use, through zooarchaeological analysis of the site's large animal bone collection.
Leslie Reeder-Myers
Temple University, PA·Social Science
Test whether sharp drops in an ancient mangrove fishery's productivity were driven by lagoon ecology, political organization or nearby farming, using excavations and sediment cores across two millennia.
The school
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo: 7 labs on PI Pages, $38M a year on research.
More about California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
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