National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant

I am so excited, now that the paperwork is finalized, that I have received an NSF DDRIG for my upcoming dissertation fieldwork! In addition to being an wonderful affirmation that the archaeological community beyond Michigan thinks my work is heading in the right direction, the support this award provides will be invaluable in ensuring I have the resources, support, and equipment I need to get the most out of my project.

For example: I'm interested in understanding what the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Chachapoyas ate. Remains such as animal bones can help, but many kinds of foods may only be preserved as tiny seeds. Others, like tubers (e.g., manioc from the Amazon, or potatoes from the highlands) might only be detectable as starches on the tools used to process them. With funds from this NSF award, I'll be able to bring down a colleague (Venicia Slotten of UC Berkeley) who specializes in paleobotany. She'll help me build a flotation machine that I'll use to capture microbotanical samples. I'll also be able to send a selection of stone tools to Arqueobios, a laboratory based in Trujillo, Peru, to identify any starches that might be on them.

I'll also be partnering with licensed Peruvian archaeologist and anthropologist Natalí Aldave, who brings invaluable technical and administrative skills to the project, as well as years of experience on projects around the country. Her expertise in the Formative and later periods complements my strengths in the Pre-Ceramic; the exploratory nature of this project makes in hard to predict what materials and contexts we might uncover, but between us we should be prepared to handle just about anything.

The details of the award, including an abstract, are available here on the National Science Foundation website.