Socioecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies SETS project
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The ultimate goal of SETS is to promote the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary examination of the tro
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Insight Development Grant, funding has been secured to conduct a pilot study aimed at evaluating the quality of various data sets relevant to elucidating the reasons for the “collapse” of a number of tropical state formations throughout South and Southeast Asia in the latter part of the “Charter Era” (CE 800-1400). The insights generated th
rough the proposed investigations will ultimately be leveraged to craft a Partnership Grant to support an international, transdisciplinary research team whose primary objective will be to mobilize knowledge concerning socio-ecological issues in the world’s tropical zones, past and present. Such issues include, but are not limited to: population growth, increasing disease rates (e.g., malaria and dengue), growing poverty, deforestation, expansion of agricultural production and monocropping, diminishing biodiversity, food and water security, and the effects of climate change. Archaeologists have a significant role to play in this important research endeavor because the many issues that are impacting contemporary tropical societies are historically contingent. Some of them may have even emerged with the earliest examples of state formation. We therefore require a comprehensive understanding of their root causes if effective mitigation strategies are to be developed. Unfortunately, there have been few concerted efforts to try to understand issues of resilience and vulnerability specific to socio-ecological systems in the tropics. Nevertheless, it has become clear that these civilizations do represent a distinct path to urban life, and they appear to have shared a certain range of vulnerabilities that ultimately contributed to their “collapse.” This pilot study will examine the latter issue by focusing on the distinctive socio-ecological histories of a series of “Charter States” from various parts of South and Southeast Asia. These state formations are not only significant to this research endeavor because they ultimately collapsed in the latter part of the Charter Era, but also because they provided a political and territorial “charter” that influenced how ensuing state level societies would develop for centuries following their demise, arguably right up to the present. The proposed data evaluation program (i.e., the assessment of data quality, kind, and availability) will promote the preliminary, cross-cultural comparison of tropical civilizations, and enhance our ability to answer the following questions: Did all of the charter states share similar organizational principals? Did these characteristics lead to specific levels of resilience and/or vulnerability to shifting environmental and/or cultural circumstances? Was the pattern of material “entanglement” similar for all of the charter states? Did the various charter states really “collapse,” or are their integrated socio-ecological histories better characterized by growth, punctuated by periods of less dramatic reorganization? How similar and/or different are the organization properties and integrated socio-ecological histories of South and Southeast Asia from what we currently know about the ancient Maya of Central America? Do contemporary nation states situated in tropical zones share certain qualities with the archaeological sample, and if so, do any of these characteristics suggest that these political formations are particularly vulnerable to environmental and/or cultural change? Does the modern “megalopolis” – strings of interconnected metropolises encompassing rural and industrial space – share any characteristics, structural or otherwise, with the tropical low-density urbanism of the charter states in question, and if so, are there any risks or vulnerabilities that contemporary planners and policy makers should be made aware of?
