QRC members lead and participate in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects from the study of past earth climates and glaciations to shifts in the geographic distributions and evolution of vegetation and faunal communities, to the evolution and dispersals of the genus Homo and the increasing scales of human modification of earth environments through the Holocene. QRC provides a venue for meeting and collaborating with scholars across Quaternary disciplines. We are also fortunate to be able to provide seed funding and small grants for member research projects. We are especially happy to support grad student and junior scholar research activities, much of which leads to larger, external funding from agencies like the National Science Foundation. Since the program’s launch in 2014, we have funded over 100 research projects.
Geoarchaeological Research of sediment samples from Angkor, Cambodia
Abstract: The largest premodern government in mainland Southeast Asia, the Angkorian empire, centered mostly in Cambodia, ruled from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries AD. During this time, numerous massive temple monuments, including Angkor Wat, were constructed. Previous research has shown how the central area of Angkor Wat was inhabited by extensive low density urban settlements (Carter et al. 2018), with distinctive cycles of decline and reorganization (Carter et al. 2019). Previous work on hydroclimate reconstruction from tropical southern Vietnamese tree rings (Buckley et al. 2010) has indicated that Angkor experienced drought during the time of the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) into the Little Ice Age (LIA). This drought appears to have led to the failure of Angkor as a viable city. However, little is known about how the remote areas of the empire were involved in these processes of expansion and decline, and how these drought events affected their involvement in the empire. We ask what impact did incorporation into the Angkor empire have on these settlements at the edge of the empire, and how did climate change affect their integration?