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Event Details:
Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On October 2,2024 we will host Dr. Maia Dedrick from Santa Clara University.
Abstract:
Recent archaeological research undertaken by the project PACOY in eastern Yucatán, Mexico, seeks to help generate a “usable past” for farmers facing climate change and other challenges to sustainable rural livelihoods today. Our archaeological objectives are to understand where people lived across the landscape, and in what configuration, during times of drought and political turmoil, and to identify the strategies they undertook to support and feed themselves. We piece together information from various types of evidence, including airborne laser imagery (“lidar” for short), ground survey, and soil sampling. Lidar has allowed for the easy detection of sinkholes (low areas that can be hundreds of meters across, and which may or may not hold water) densely distributed across the landscape. When dry, sinkholes provide deep soils useful for cultivation and cooking within earth ovens. In some cases, they are persistent places—locations that people have returned to repeatedly. Lidar and ground survey have highlighted instances of people living at the edges of such features. Our analysis of sinkhole soil profiles has focused on pollen and soil carbon isotopes to reconstruct vegetation trends and identify periods of more intensive use. In addition to these archaeological methods, we have engaged in interviews and conversations with today’s expert farmers in the town of Tahcabo, Yucatán (on whose common lands we work), to probe how our research into past agricultural adaptations could be applicable or inspiring to them. The talk will address some of the promises and difficulties of such an approach.