Dissertation: Landscape Learning in the Late Glacial Recolonization of Northwestern Europe

在Steven Kuhn博士的支持下，Marcy Rockman女士将为她的博士论文收集和分析数据。她将以最后一个冰河时代末期欧洲西北部的重新安置为例，研究当人类只能从景观本身了解自然资源时，他们是如何认识和利用自然资源的。在大约2万到1.4万年前的最后一个冰河时期，冰盖几乎延伸到了今天的伦敦，人类集中在法国西南部和莱茵河谷中部。到冰层消退的时候，从巴黎盆地向北到不列颠群岛的地区已经被遗弃了至少6000年。第一批重新进入这一地区的人必须重新学习该地区自然资源的位置和限制，只使用他们对景观的了解和他们自己在陌生环境中的经验。虽然这种信息有限的殖民在整个人类历史上发生过很多次，但人类学习新景观的实际过程尚未得到很好的理解。洛克曼女士的研究将开发一种研究这一过程的方法，并密切关注现代人类占领欧洲西北部的最初阶段。在这项研究中，将从人类发现和早期使用燧石露头的角度来研究景观学习过程。燧石是一种细粒岩石，在史前通常用于制造石器。洛克曼女士将收集已发表的石器来源、放射性碳年代和其他人工制品组合信息，这些信息来自于大约14000到9500年前的英国、法国北部和比利时东部的遗址。代表这一完整时间范围的精选现存石器收藏将根据岩石的范围进行研究，特别是所代表的燧石类型。罗克曼女士将利用石器来源信息作为具体地质特征和地区的指导，对燧石来源的地形进行实地测量。所有这些数据将在地理信息系统（GIS）分析中结合起来。最后的解释将根据单个燧石来源的特征和利用模式，以及对冰期晚期和冰期后早期土地利用的总体复杂性进行比较。这个项目将有助于解释人类如何学会在一个新地方生活。它将为考古学家测试其他殖民地提供数据和方法基础。它将作为考古、地质和计算机模型研究相结合的潜力的一个例子，并将有助于培养有前途的年轻科学家。

With the support of Dr. Steven Kuhn, Ms. Marcy Rockman will collect and analyze data for her doctoral dissertation. Using the example of the resettlement of northwestern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, she will study how humans come to know and use natural resources when they can only learn about them from the landscape itself. During the last Ice Age, which dates to approximately 20,000 to 14,000 years ago, the ice sheets reached almost to the location of present-day London and human populations were concentrated in southwestern France and in the central Rhine valley. By the time the ice retreated, the region from the Paris Basin northward through the British Isles had been abandoned for at least 6,000 years. The first humans to re- enter this area had to learn the locations and limitations of the region's natural resources anew, using only their knowledge of landscape from which they had come and their own experiences in the unfamiliar environment. While such colonizations with limited information have taken place many times throughout human history, the actual process by which humans learn a new landscape is not yet well understood. Ms. Rockman's research will develop a means of studying this process and focus closely on the very beginnings of the modern human occupation of northwestern Europe.In this study, the landscape learning process will be studied from the perspective of human discovery and early use of outcrops of chert, a fine-grained rock commonly used to make stone tools in prehistory. Ms. Rockman will collect published stone tool sourcing, radiocarbon date, and other artifact assemblage information from sites dating between approximately 14,000 and 9,500 years ago from England, northern France, and eastern Belgium. Selected extant stone tool collections representing this full time range will be studied in regard to the range of rock and particularly chert types represented. Using the stone tool sourcing information as a guide to specific geological features and areas, Ms. Rockman will take field measurements of the topography of the chert sources. All this data will then be combined in geographic information systems (GIS) analyses. Final interpretations will be made from the characteristics and use patterns of individual chert sources and comparison of the overall complexity of land use across the late glacial and early post-glacial time periods.This project will provide help to explain how humans learn to live in a new place. It will provide a base of both data and method against which archaeologists may test other colonizations. It will serve as an example of the potential of combined archaeological, geological, and computer modeling research, and it will contribute to the interdisciplinary training of a promising young scientist.