Building resilience and sustainability through collaboration and community research

Summary

The island of Barbuda, West Indies has a relatively unique history, land tenure and geography. Despite its arid climate and thin soils, the enslaved and eventually free people of Barbuda developed a complex herding ecology and built historic wells that are strategically located around the island to support their sustainably resilient agricultural practices. Now, these wells are largely abandoned and people are increasingly dependent on external food and water. An interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, anthropologists, and geoscientists are working closely with US undergraduate and graduate students, along with Barbudan experts and high school students to document these historic wells and assess the state of food and water resources on the island. Our research approach integrates traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) with western science to take a long-term perspective and assessment of the present situation. The methods used for data collection are varied and include kite and unmanned flight air photography, GPS mapping, water and soil testing, surveys and focus group discussions. Together, this collaboration is building a robust dataset while enhancing the capacity of people to address the challenges being brought about by climate change.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Many faces, many perspectives: archaeology and communities in practice.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage