A MacArthur 'genius' gleans surprising lessons from ancient bones, shards and trash

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Kristina Douglass was doing the dishes in her slippers when she received the call from the MacArthur Foundation, giving her the news that she had received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship .

"I told them I was in my office," she recalls, "but really I was at the kitchen sink, looking as surprised and stunned as I felt. It was a very surreal moment."

Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University, received the $800,000 award for her research "investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability."

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To explore this question, she conducts much of her fieldwork in southwest Madagascar, "a place where the coral reef, very clear blue waters, meet a dry desert vegetation scape," she says. "It's the most amazing landscape I've ever been in."

This corner of the island nation is inhabited by a diverse mosaic of human communities — and has been for millennia. Some focus on fishing in the ocean or among the mangroves, others on herding zebu cattle, and still others on harvesting resources from the forest.

Douglass says the people living there have grappled with environmental and climate change for generations, including fluctuations in precipitation patterns and sea surface temperatures. In her work, she pores over archaeological artifacts and animal remains to piece together the strategies they've long used to cope with these challenges.

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