I was studying physics at Georgia State University. One day we were out in a field trying to detect chemical discharge into a stream using polymer waveguide technology. Across the way, some other people were out digging. I was shooting the breeze with one of them and found out they were excavating an archeological site. They were talking about what they could infer by studying the human bones they dug up. Among other things, they said they could determine what people had eaten, their nutrition, and their overall health. They could also look for pathologies like osteoporosis or for other diseases. I said to myself, "I could relate to that."
I eventually switched to anthropology, the parent discipline of archeology, and transferred to the University of Georgia where I got my undergraduate degree. In my doctoral program at UNLV, I'm studying animal remains from the Neolithic Jordanian village of Ghwair from a period about 10,000 years ago. I'm working with professor Alan Simmons. He picked me for his team in part for my interest in paleoecology, the study of environments of the past, and in part for my background in computing. He needed someone with skills in Geographic Information Software, which uses computers to analyze the spatial distribution of artifacts at sites we unearth to help reconstruct the past. Ultimately, studying the environments of the past will help us make more effective policy and landuse decisions and make us more aware of environmental degradation and the role humans play in it.
Ghwair existed about 2,000 years after we see the origins of agriculture in the region. One of the consequences of agriculture and of staying in one place is that you start to get a fluorescence of religion, art, social organization, and economic specialization, and you get population growth. That's what happened at Ghwair. Then all of the sudden, it was abandoned. I want to know why. I want to see if they overexploited the local resources.
To find out what happened at Ghwair, I look at how food was acquired, prepared, and consumed, and I look at the economic and social implications of these practices. I am especially interested in their domestication of goats.
Goats will eat anything. If you have a species like goats that over-graze the vegetation, eventually you're going to wipe out the vegetation and lose the topsoil and fertility of your land. From our site work, we already know that they were using goats for food. They would target the males for slaughter at two-and-a-half to three-years-old. They probably kept the females for reproduction, and by-products like cheese and milk. But when you start tethering an animal to a particular area instead of allowing it to roam freely, the animal will overexploit its environment.
When we look at the past, we can see the changes that agriculture has brought about. This is of practical value today as developing countries grow rapidly and try to adapt agriculture for peripheral areas similar to that found in southern Jordan. So what we find at Ghwair is extremely important for communities that are beginning to adapt to agriculture for the first time. We're trying to use the past as a guide of what could happen so we don't keep making the same mistakes.
