Late Prehistoric Cultural Dynamics and the Subsistence Parameters of Whaling at Wales, Alaska

摘要：威尔士考古项目关注的是阿拉斯加的一个社区，在接触期间，这个社区至少有500人。从历史上看，这个村庄是阿拉斯加西北部的主要社会经济中心。与亚洲爱斯基摩人进行贸易和战争的威尔士人；这些活动可能吸引了大量威尔士人来到这个地方。这种情况可能是阿拉斯加西部考察爱斯基摩史前晚期社会等级的可能性的最好机会。因此，这一分析的结果将直接与世界各地狩猎采集群体的社会政治和社会地域研究有关，它们将大大有助于加深对平等主义社会发展复杂性的理解，因为这些社会群体正在转变为正式排名的社会群体，如西北海岸文化区记录的那些社会群体。对特征分布的分析还将审查威尔士地区三个地点史前晚期爱斯基摩人表现之间的关系。这些遗址包含动物遗骸，可以说明史前人类对鲸鱼的捕食是在同时开发各种非鲸类海洋和陆地动物的背景下进行的。初步调查结果表明，非鲸类海洋哺乳动物在威尔士的经济中发挥的作用比以前所说的要大得多，它们提出了一些关于当地资源承载能力的问题，这与当地过多的人类居民有关。动物群数据库的进一步发展和伴随的分析将阐明大量集中的人口是如何利用当地资源的。这些结果将有助于提高对巨型动物在史前更新世和全新世人类自给自足经济中的作用的解释。

OPP-0080798 "Late Prehistoric Cultural Dynamics and the Subsistence Parameters of Whaling at Wales, Alaska."ABSTRACT: The Wales archaeology project focuses on a community in Alaska that, during contact period, comprised a population of at least 500 individuals. Historically the village was a primary socioeconomic center in northwest Alaska. Wales people engaged in trade and warfare with Asiatic Eskimos; these activities may have drawn the large Wales population to the location. This circumstance provides perhaps the best opportunity in western Alaska to examine the possibility of social ranking in late prehistoric Eskimo society. The results of this analysis will therefore pertain directly to sociopolitical and socioterritorial studies of hunter-gatherer groups worldwide, and they will contribute substantially to increased understanding of developing complexity in egalitarian societies as they are transformed into formally ranked social groups such as those that have been documented in the Northwest Coast culture area. Analyses of trait distributions will also examine relations between the late prehistoric Eskimo manifestations at three sites in the Wales locality. The sites contain faunal remains, which can illuminate the context in which the prehistoric human predation of whales was carried out against the background of simultaneous exploitation of various non-cetacean marine and terrestrial fauna. Preliminary findings indicate that non-cetacean sea mammals played a much larger role in the economy of Wales than has been suggested previously, and they raise a number of questions concerning the carrying capacity of the local resources in relation to the exceedingly large number of human inhabitants of the locality. Further development of the faunal database and accompanying analysis will illuminate how the large, concentrated population used local resources. The results will contribute to an increased precision in interpretations of the role of mega-fauna in prehistoric Pleistocene and Holocene human subsistence economies.