Research project
Resilience as Human–Environmental Engagement: Sustainability in Pre-Columbian Central America
How can archaeological datasets reveal the interplay between past indigenous understandings of the surrounding world and resilient and sustainable ways of life in the Isthmo-Colombian Area?
- Duration
- 2024 - 2029
- Contact
- Alexander Geurds
- Funding
-
NWO
Project description
What determines a society’s ability to cope with external change? How is such resilience linked to ontological ways of engaging with natural surroundings? How is sustainability achieved during processes of increasing connectivity? Such questions are pressing, given the urgency of human responses to current environmental change.
The archaeology of Middle America is marked by changes in socio-political complexity, such as the Maya city states, which are often cited in narratives on societal collapse. In contrast, neighboring communities in the Isthmo-Colombian Area (between Honduras and Colombia) exhibited long-term stability between 300 and 1500 CE, despite fluctuating environmental conditions. What enabled this extraordinary societal stability?
This project addresses this question through an area-wide, long-term, multiscalar, and cross-disciplinary approach. By linking museum collections, ethnography, and geochemistry, the subprojects focus on:
- Practices of monumentality;
- Ways of relating to local flora, fauna, and geological resources;
- Area-wide patterns of historically documented human–environmental relations, and
- Distinctive forms of depicting surroundings through material culture.
All datasets are interconnected in a wide-ranging public spatial data infrastructure (GIS), following a big data approach.
Project activities include collaborating with museums in the research area and linking previously disconnected archaeological datasets. Additionally, targeted fieldwork will generate new archaeological data from regions such as central and Caribbean Nicaragua and northeastern Colombia.
One reason for this project is the relative paucity of archaeological work in the Isthmo-Colombian Area. While dozens of universities have investigated Mesoamerican contexts for decades, this area has received only a fraction of such attention. Another reason is the contemporary relevance of understanding how human societies in this area developed sustainable practices, successfully maintaining community continuity despite challenging natural surroundings. In contrast, neighboring societies in Mesoamerica were far less resilient and stable when adapting to these fluctuating conditions.
Focusing on the long-term balanced human–environmental relations throughout southern Central America and northern South America, the overall aim of this research project is to learn from archaeological traces how this stability was achieved and maintained. In the 21st century, as we face rapidly changing climatic and environmental conditions, the past may offer valuable insights to help envision alternative futures.
Scientific relevance
The integration of archaeometry, landscape archaeology, and semiotic object analysis, all embedded in a holistic relational database for the Isthmo-Colombian Area, offers a novel approach to studying long-term societal balance and continuity.
By using case studies from across the area and leveraging the integrative power of a spatial data infrastructure (GIS), the project will enrich ongoing debates on past societal organization. It will highlight the relevance of this area in world archaeology as a prime example of prehistoric societal stability, contributing to broader discussions on the interplay between social constancy and environmental challenges.
Why Leiden University?
The Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University has a strong interest in human–environmental relations and the prehistoric dynamics of mobility and societal change. It houses one of the largest research groups in Europe focused on the pre-Columbian Americas, with ongoing studies spanning broad geographic scope and regional projects in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras.
These studies are complemented by research at the Centre for Indigenous Americas Studies within the Faculty of Humanities. The Faculty of Archaeology's laboratory facilities are key collaborators for this project, and its emphasis on spatial data analysis provides ideal conditions for the project’s big data component and GIS applications.
The project will operate using Geurds’s extensive international network, involving seven EU universities working on various aspects of pre-Columbian societies and comparative scholarship. It will also utilize the world-leading radiocarbon-dating facilities at the University of Oxford and the unique reference collections at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Additionally, the project will be advised by senior regional experts, primarily based at institutions within the research area.
Subprojects
The project is structured around a cross-disciplinary, big data approach and targeted in-depth case studies. All resulting datasets are interconnected in a public web-based spatial data infrastructure (GIS), covering the Isthmo-Colombian Area. The data involves both systematic assessments of existing evidence and the collection of new archaeological, ethnographic, and palaeoecological field data.
To address human–landscape interactions, Arturo García De León is conducting a study on lithic raw material acquisition. The use of volcanic stones for sculptures and monumental constructions has been observed in Central Nicaragua from 300 CE onwards. Case studies will undergo integrated material analysis in the Material Culture laboratory, resulting in a public comparative dataset for archaeological igneous materials. This dataset will focus on community–landscape interactions and resource use in the region.
In one postdoctoral project, Dita Auziņa is investigating the role of monumental earthworks—long-term, intergenerational communal endeavors—in pre-Columbian societies. By modeling human–landscape interactions, the study integrates high-resolution environmental and archaeological data from two key case studies: Central Nicaragua and the Caribbean coast. This multidisciplinary approach combines extensive, targeted archaeological and paleoenvironmental fieldwork with historical and contemporary environmental datasets, all analyzed within a GIS framework. The research aims to illuminate the emergence of monumentality during periods of severe environmental stress.
In another postdoctoral project, Eduardo N. Herrera Malatesta is studying settlement patterns and landscape dynamics across time in the Muisca territory of Colombia. This subproject examines how the environmental setting of the Llanos ecoregion of Colombia and Venezuela influenced settlement configurations and the development of monumentality. By comparing existing archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and ethnohistoric data with environmental variables, this subproject creates simulations and models using GIS, spatial statistical, and network analysis methods.
In a third postdoctoral project, Adam K. Benfer is developing a large-scale geospatial database of select portable pre-Columbian objects from the Isthmo-Colombian Area, featuring artistic expressions of naturalistic imagery. The database compiles detailed physical descriptions, iconographic representations, and spatiotemporal placements of individual objects housed in museums worldwide. This facilitates comparative semiotic analyses and object-centered understandings of human–environmental engagement. The project's first phase focuses on stone zoomorphic effigy metates from southern Central America, with future phases planned to include a broader range of aesthetically-laden significant artifacts.