Collaborative Research: Investigating the Linkage Among Environment, Subsistence, and Work Allocation

合作研究：调查环境、生存和工作分配之间的联系

• 批准号: 1632522
• 负责人: Brian Codding
• 金额: $ 6.01万
• 依托单位: University of Utah
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-08-15 至 2021-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1632522&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Investigating; Linkage; Among; Collaborative; Research; Investigating; Linkage; Among

Explaining how humans adapt to climate change and population growth remain central research questions in anthropology and are relevant to contemporary issues. About fourteen thousand years ago, ancestral Native Americans first entered the Great Basin of North America, where they encountered a landscape dominated by large inland lakes and marshes. Although the climate was generally cooler and wetter than today, it was highly variable and experienced dramatic shifts associated with the transition from the Pleistocene to Holocene epochs. Nonetheless, early Native Americans developed a stable adaptation, characterized by a flexible technology and subsistence base, and high mobility that persevered over the ensuing six millennia, but dramatically reorganized with the onset of extreme aridity about 8,000 years ago. Understanding how these first Americans made a living, interacted with one another, and adapted to climatic change is critical to explaining the colonization of the Americas, and how humans adapt to changing environments more generally. The researchers believe that a cooperative organization of labor by gender was the central feature of this adaptation. This work will develop and validate a general model of human adaptation and a predictive model of archaeological site location useful in other academic research and public lands cultural resource management. It will also garner primary data on past climatic and vegetation change that will contribute broadly to understanding of environmental variability in the western United States. In addition to supporting undergraduate and graduate student education, this project will disseminate research findings to the public through coverage from public broadcasting and major events at regional museums. It is challenging to recover and interpret archaeological evidence of human responses to past climate change from ancient contexts significantly different from modern environments. Gathering the necessary data requires well-grounded theoretical expectations both about where people likely lived and where evidence of their activities has survived. This project adopts such a research strategy by coupling behavioral and geomorphological models to identify and recover evidence of past human habitation along these ancient lake and marsh habitats. This project combines theoretical predictions from behavioral ecology about women?s and men?s subsistence strategies, with sophisticated geomorphological models to predict where they are likely to be preserved in datable buried deposits. Focused on explaining the pre-9,000 year old archaeology of Grass Valley, Nevada, this project entails targeted archaeological field investigations, generating paleoenvironmental reconstructions from pollen profiles and packrat middens, and conducting geochemical explorations of local fine-grained volcanic toolstone quarries. Combined, these data will allow systematic investigation of how early Native Americans adapted to the Pleistocene Great Basin through a period of changing climate. The central theoretical and methodological models developed and tested in the project are generalizable to other contexts, providing a framework to explain processes of human colonization and adaptation around the world.

解释人类如何适应气候变化和人口增长仍然是人类学中的核心研究问题，并且与当代问题有关。大约一万十万年前，祖先的美国原住民首先进入北美大盆地，在那里他们遇到了一个由大型内陆湖泊和沼泽主导的景观。尽管气候通常比今天更凉爽，更湿，但它与从更新世到全新世时代的过渡相关的高度可变和经历的急剧变化。尽管如此，早期的美洲原住民发展了一种稳定的适应性，其特征是灵活的技术和生存基础，并且在随后的六千年中一直坚持不懈，但大约在8000年前的极端流行欲时，却急剧重新组织。了解这些第一美国人是如何谋生，相互互动并适应气候变化的方式，对于解释美洲的殖民化以及人类如何更普遍地适应不断变化的环境至关重要。研究人员认为，性别合作组织是这种适应的核心特征。这项工作将开发并验证人类适应的一般模型，以及考古地点位置的预测模型，可用于其他学术研究和公共土地文化资源管理。它还将获得有关过去气候变化和植被变化的主要数据，这将广泛地理解美国西部的环境变异性。除了支持本科和研究生教育外，该项目还将通过在地区博物馆的公共广播和重大活动中向公众传播研究结果。恢复和解释人类对过去气候变化的反应与与现代环境显着不同的古老环境的反应的考古证据是一项挑战。收集必要的数据需要关于人们可能居住的地方和活动证据幸存的理论期望。该项目通过耦合行为和地貌模型采用这种研究策略，以识别和回收这些古老湖泊和沼泽栖息地的过去人类居住的证据。该项目结合了从行为生态学中对女性和男性生计策略的理论预测，并结合了精致的地貌模型，以预测它们可能保存在数据掩埋的沉积物中。该项目致力于解释内华达州草谷（Grass Valley）的9,000年历史的考古学，需要进行针对性的考古野外调查，从而产生了来自花粉概况和Packrat Middens的古环境重建，并进行了当地的细粒度沃尔西尼克·沃尔西尼克工具工具石的地球化学探索。这些数据结合在一起，可以系统地调查美洲原住民如何在变化的气候时期适应更新世大盆地。项目中开发和测试的中心理论和方法论模型可推广到其他情况下，提供了一个框架来解释世界各地人类殖民和适应过程的过程。