Doctoral Dissertation: Ceramic Exchange and Technology in the Late Prehistoric Western Great Basin

在 Michael Jochim 博士的指导下，Jelmer Eerkens 先生将为他的博士论文收集数据。埃肯斯先生的目标是双重的。他是一位考古学家，研究过美国西部大盆地的史前晚期狩猎和采集民族，他希望了解这些群体如何适应严酷且不可预测的沙漠环境。他还计划使用陶瓷数据来了解它如何以及在多大程度上可以用于有用的分析目的。由于陶瓷在考古遗址中很常见且保存完好，因此它们构成了一个重要的类别，史前学家从多个角度对它们进行研究，以确定它们可以为过去的行为提供哪些线索。在史前时期，大多数陶瓷是由居住在村庄和较大社会单位的农业民族制造的，他们过着相当定居的生活。在这些群体中，事实证明可以使用陶瓷来重建社会分层、经济和政治组织以及群体间关系的许多方面，因此它们已被证明是一种强大的工具。史前狩猎和采集群体很少，但制造陶瓷及其在这一社会组织层面的科学潜力却很少被探索。然而，在最近一段时期，美国大盆地的团体开始制造陶器，在考古发掘过程中发现了大量陶器样本。由于其制作普遍粗糙、无装饰、缺乏细致的风格特征，因而受到的关注相对较少。埃尔肯斯将对来自大盆地多个地点和地区的陶器碎片和粘土矿床进行化学分析。微量元素分析将用于表征沉积物，将碎片分为化学相似的类别，并将碎片与原材料来源相匹配。脂质分析有望有助于确定这些罐子中所含的材料。在此基础上，应该可以追踪陶器和人类在景观中的移动，并确定各个群体之间社会关系的性质。还应该可以确定陶器出于直接生存目的和其他目的进行交易的程度。这项研究很重要，原因有几个。它将为人们对美国史前时期知之甚少的时期提供新的见解。它将有助于开发适用于各种考古情况的分析方法，为狩猎和采集者层面的社会组织提供新的线索，并最终帮助培养有前途的年轻科学家。

Under the direction of Dr. Michael Jochim, Mr. Jelmer Eerkens will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Eerkens' goals are twofold. His is an archaeologist who has studied late prehistoric hunting and gathering peoples of the US Western Great Basin and he wishes to understand how such groups adapted to a harsh and unpredictable desert environment. He also plans to use ceramic data to understand how and to what extent it can serve useful analytic purposes. Because ceramics are both common and well preserved in archaeological sites, they constitute an important category and prehistorians study them from a number of perspectives to determine what light they may shed on past behavior. In prehistory most ceramics were made by agricultural peoples who resided in villages and larger social units and who lived a fairly settled existence. In such groups it has proven possible to use ceramics to reconstruct many aspects of social stratification, economic and political organization and inter group relations and thus they have proven a powerful tool. Very few prehistoric hunter and gatherer groups however manufactured ceramics and their scientific potential at this level of social organization has been little explored. During more recent periods of time however groups in the US Great Basin manufactured pottery, large samples of which have been recovered in the course of archaeological excavations. Because it is generally crudely made, undecorated and lacking in detailed stylistic characteristics relatively little attention has been paid to it.Mr. Eerkens will conduct chemical analyses of both potsherds and clay deposits from a number of Great Basin sites and regions. Trace element analysis will be employed to characterize deposits, to group sherds into chemically similar classes and to match sherds to raw material source. Lipid analysis will, hopefully, serve to determine the materials which such pots contained. On this basis it should be possible to trace the movement of both pottery and people across the landscape and to determine the nature of social relations between individual groups. It should also be possible to determine the extent to which pottery was traded for direct subsistence versus other purposes.This research is important for several reasons. It will provide new insight into a poorly understood period of US prehistory. It will help to develop methods of analysis useful in a variety of archaeological situations, shed new light on hunter and gatherer level social organization and finally assist in training a promising young scientist.