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。埃肯斯的目标有两个。他是一位考古学家，研究过美国西部大盆地的晚期史前狩猎和聚居民族，他希望了解这些群体是如何适应恶劣和不可预测的沙漠环境的。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服务于有用的分析目的。由于陶瓷在考古遗址中很常见，而且保存完好，它们构成了一个重要的类别，史前学者从多个角度对它们进行研究，以确定它们可能揭示出过去的行为。在史前，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，他们过着相当稳定的生活。在这样的群体中，已经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，因此它们被证明是一个强大的工具。然而，很少有史前狩猎者和采集者群体制造陶瓷，他们在这种社会组织层面上的科学潜力几乎没有被发掘。然而，在最近的一段时间里，美国大盆地的群体制造了陶器，在考古发掘过程中发现了大量陶器样本。由于它的制作一般粗制滥造，没有装饰，缺乏详细的风格特征，因此相对较少受到关注。Eerkens将对一些大盆地遗址和地区的陶片和粘土沉积物进行化学分析。将使用微量元素分析来确定矿床的特征，将碎片归类为化学相似的类别，并将碎片与原材料来源进行匹配。脂类分析有望帮助确定这些罐子所装的材料。在此基础上，应该可以追踪陶器和人在整个景观中的运动，并确定各个群体之间社会关系的性质。也应该有可能确定陶器在多大程度上是为了直接谋生而交易，而不是出于其他目的。这项研究之所以重要，有几个原因。它将为人们提供对美国史前这段鲜为人知的时期的新洞察。它将有助于开发在各种考古情况下有用的分析方法，对狩猎者和采集者级别的社会组织有新的认识，并最终帮助培训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.