Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Prehistoric Cultural and Natural Processes on Waterbirds in the Pacific Northwest Coast

在唐纳德·K·格雷森博士的指导下，克里斯汀·M·博维将为她的博士论文收集数据。她正在鉴定和分析北美太平洋西北海岸以前出土的三个大型考古遗址的鸟类骨骼：沃特莫湾(华盛顿州圣胡安群岛)、米纳德(华盛顿海岸)和Umpqua/Eden(俄勒冈海岸)。之前的研究表明，这些遗址是在过去1000-3000年间被占领的。博维计划获得更多的放射性碳测年数据，以便更好地确定发现的骨骼的年代。她的目标是评估这些地点所代表的鸟类种类是如何随着时间的推移而变化的，以及为什么会发生这些变化。假设发现了显著的变化(初步研究表明这种变化确实发生了)，这项研究将聚焦于三个主要因素来解释这些变化：人类狩猎、气候变化和地震事件。博维的研究是跨学科的，将对考古学和生物学问题做出贡献。例如，她的工作将提供太平洋西北海岸人与鸟相互作用的历史信息。这一地区的早期人类学家和欧美探险家描述了当地人猎鸟的许多有效方法。特别是，他们使用了许多不同种类的网来捕捉大量的觅食和飞行的水鸟，包括水下和大型悬挂网。然而，这种做法的历史和影响尚不清楚。在其他食物资源因人口增加而耗尽的情况下，是在早期使用还是在晚些时候才使用？这项研究也可能有助于关于社会不平等是如何以及何时在西北海岸原住民中发展起来的辩论。一种假说表明，不平等的形成部分是因为该地区的许多食物资源在时间和空间上是局部的，因此可能由个人或家庭拥有和保护(例如，鲑鱼返回产卵)。然而，没有人考虑过鸟类在这种情况下可能扮演的角色，也没有人考虑过这种狩猎可能对鸟类本身产生的影响。这项研究也很重要，因为它将提供太平洋西北海岸水鸟种群亟需的长期数据。对鸟类的系统观察仅限于过去50-100年，许多鸟类学家和生态学家意识到，需要进行更长期的研究，以更好地了解和管理这些种群。了解气候变化、地震和海平面上升等自然过程过去对鸟类的影响，可以帮助我们预测它们对未来类似事件的反应，如全球变暖。

Under the direction of Dr. Donald K. Grayson, Ms. Kristine M. Bovy will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She is identifying and analyzing bird bones from three large, previously excavated archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America: Watmough Bay (San Juan Islands, WA), Minard (Washington Coast) and Umpqua/Eden (Oregon Coast). Previous work suggests these sites were occupied during the past 1,000- 3,000 years. Ms. Bovy plans to obtain additional radiocarbon dates in order to better determine the ages of the bones recovered. Her goal is to evaluate how the kinds of birds represented at these sites has changed through time, and why these changes occurred. Assuming that significant change is discovered (and preliminary research suggests that such change did occur), the research will focus on three prime factors to explain those changes: human hunting, climate change and earthquake events.Ms. Bovy's research is interdisciplinary and will contribute to both archaeological and biological questions. For instance, her work will provide information on the history of the interaction between people and birds in the Pacific Northwest Coast. Early anthropologists and Euro-American explorers in this region describe the many effective methods that native peoples had for hunting birds. In particular, they used a number of different kinds of nets to catch large numbers of feeding and flying waterfowl, including submerged and large hanging nets. However, the antiquity and impact of such practices is unknown. Were bird nets used early on or only later when other food resources had been depleted due to increasing human populations? This research may also contribute to the debate about how and when social inequality developed among native Northwest Coast peoples. One hypothesis suggests that inequalities evolved, in part, because many food resources in this region are localized in time and space and therefore could be owned and defended by individuals or families (e.g., salmon returning to spawn). However, no one has considered the role that birds, which are at times hunted in localized and defensible spots on the landscape, could have played in this setting, nor has anyone considered the impact that such hunting may have had on the birds themselves.This research is also important because it will provide much needed long-term data on waterbird populations in the Pacific Northwest Coast. Systematic observations of birds are limited to the past 50-100 years, and many ornithologists and ecologists are realizing that longer-term studies are needed to better understand and manage these populations. Knowing how natural processes such as climatic change, earthquakes and sea-level rise affected birds in the past, could help us predict their responses to similar events in the future, such as global warming.