Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Quantifying Surplus And Sustainability In The Archaeological Record At The Carthaginian-Roman Urban Mound Of Zita, Tripolitania, Brett Kaufman, Hans Barnard, Ali Drine, Rayed Khedher, Alan Farahani, Sami Ben Tahar, Elyssa Jerray, Brian N. Damiata, Megan Daniels, Jessica Cerezo-Román, Thomas Fenn, Victoria Moses

Anthropology Faculty Research

Cultural ecological theory is applied to a spatially and temporally bounded archaeological data set to document long-term paleoeco-logical processes and associated sociopolitical behaviors. Volumetric excavations, treating the material culture of an archaeological matrix similar to an ecological core, can yield quantifiable frequencies of surplus goods that provide a multiproxy empirical lens into incremental changes in land use practices, natural resource consumption, and, in this case, likely overexploitation. Archaeological methods are employed to quantify cultural ecological processes of natural resource exploitation, industrial intensification, sustainability and scarcity, and settlement collapse during the colonial transition between Carthaginian and Roman North Africa. The data …