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

在Donald K. Grayson博士的指导下，Kristine M. Bovy女士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发掘的三个大型考古遗址的鸟类骨头：沃特莫夫湾（华盛顿州圣胡安群岛）、米纳德（华盛顿海岸）和乌姆普夸/伊登（俄勒冈海岸）。先前的研究表明，这些遗址在过去的1000到3000年间就有人居住了。Bovy女士计划获得更多的放射性碳年代，以便更好地确定被发现的骨头的年龄。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，以及这些变化发生的原因。假设发现了重大变化（初步研究表明确实发生了这种变化），研究将集中在三个主要因素上来解释这些变化：人类狩猎、气候变化和地震事件。Bovy的研究是跨学科的，将为考古学和生物学问题做出贡献。例如，她的工作将提供有关太平洋西北海岸人类与鸟类相互作用历史的信息。在这一地区的早期人类学家和欧美探险者描述了许多土著人猎鸟的有效方法。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禽，包括水下和大型悬挂网。然而，这种做法的古代和影响是未知的。捕鸟网是在早期使用的，还是在后来由于人口增加而耗尽了其他食物资源时才使用的？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。一种假说认为，不平等现象的发展，部分原因是该地区的许多食物资源在时间和空间上都是局部的，因此可以由个人或家庭拥有和保护（例如，鲑鱼返回产卵）。然而，没有人考虑到鸟类在这种情况下可能扮演的角色，鸟类有时会在当地和防御地点被猎杀，也没有人考虑到这种狩猎对鸟类本身可能产生的影响。这项研究也很重要，因为它将为太平洋西北海岸的水鸟种群提供急需的长期数据。对鸟类的系统观察仅限于过去的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来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在过去是如何影响鸟类的，可以帮助我们预测它们对未来类似事件（如全球变暖）的反应。

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.