Abby Buffington has received word that her National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant proposal has been approved for funding.  Her project, "Becoming Food Producers: A Phytolith Analysis of Niche Construction by Forager-Herders in Neolithic Southern Arabia," investigates the impact a foraging economy's incorporation of animal domestics had on the plant communities surrounding several early to middle Holocene (9th to 5th millennium BP) sites in the Wadi Sana region of Hadramawt, Yemen.  She is framing anthropogenic alterations to the landscape (burning of vegetation, water management and animal husbandry) by foragers and pastoralists over these millennia as niche construction events. She tests the hypothesis that this marginal environment was developed by these events,  supporting later and more intensified agricultural communities.  She is also testing this larger question by extracting and analyzing phytolith- amorphous silica compounds deposited in soils following plant decay- assemblages from these off-site contexts and comparing them to those recovered from on-site sediments. The result of her research project will contribute to questions about how agricultural technology spreads to new environments and the role pastoralists play in both the ecological and social transition to food production.