Doctoral Dissertation Research: Long Term Settlement De-nucleation

About This Grant

Urbanization has remained a dominant global demographic trend since its origins nearly 6,000 years ago. This doctoral dissertation research project examines what factors are most predictive of urbanization, deurbanization, and urban de-nucleation. Much of the archaeological data has focused on sedentary societies in arable river valleys, which yield models of gradual settlement growth and decline largely based on population and agricultural surplus. A larger, more varied dataset is necessary to get a clearer archaeological understanding of more rapid trajectories toward urbanization and deurbanization among non-farming societies. A crucial component of this research involves using satellite imagery to identify and map small non-urban settlements surrounding known urban sites. In doing so, this project will help to develop U.S. geospatial research capabilities by refining and publishing open-source and reproducible methodologies on a large satellite image dataset. This effort will provide students with valuable training in geospatial methods. This project responds to research priorities in the science of artificial intelligence through the study and usage of computers and software through the development satellite imagery-based machine learning and other deep learning models. To better understand the social and environmental factors surrounding urbanization and deurbanization, it is necessary to determine functional differences between large central settlements and the smaller sites in their peripheries. The investigators use satellite image surveys coupled with systematic soil coring to 1) investigate two settlements in a period of technological development and 2) identify alternative sites in the peripheries of these two sites. Preliminary investigations suggest that metallurgic production may have played a crucial role in the formation of large, fortified pastoralist settlements in this region; therefore, the investigators analyze soil chemistry to find traces of metallurgical activity in both urban and non-urban settlements. These soil cores provide artifacts and organic materials for radiocarbon dating, allowing the investigators to establish a chronology; thereby determining if urban sites were surrounded by smaller contemporary sites that provisioned them with food or metallurgical resources, and illustrating how/when these landscapes were abandoned. These data will help the investigators explore hypotheses to explain the formation and dissolution of pastoralist urban landscapes. 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.