Doctoral Dissertaion Improvement Grant: Environment and Culture Change in the Santa Barbara Channel, California, during the Early and Middle Holocene

博士论文改进补助金：全新世早期和中期加利福尼亚州圣巴巴拉海峡的环境和文化变化

• 批准号: 1041495
• 负责人: David Meltzer
• 金额: $ 1.37万
• 依托单位: Southern Methodist University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1041495&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertaion; Improvement; Grant; Environment

Under the direction of Dr. David Meltzer, Ms. Leslie Reeder will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will analyze archaeological data to determine how early hunting and gathering societies on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands in California adapted to rapidly changing environmental conditions at the end of the last Ice Age. During this period, rapidly rising sea levels and worldwide transformations in climate reorganized both the marine and terrestrial ecosystems on which many people depended. These ecological shifts were particularly strong along temperate coasts, where marine transgression and fluctuating sea surface temperatures substantially altered available resources in the near shore, estuarine, and terrestrial environments. This time period has been implicated in the early development of agriculture in the Old World and in the foundation of New World societies, and it saw people intensify their relationship with coastal ecosystems throughout much of the world. In spite of the interest focused on this time period, its coastlines have been difficult to study. Many have been inundated by sea level rise, and the time depth makes both archaeological and environmental data difficult to obtain. On California's Northern Channel Islands, rich paleoecological, geological, climatic, and archaeological records provide a remarkable opportunity to study the effects of these environmental changes on ancient people, while the geographic positioning of the islands has partially protected them from the heavy impacts of sea level rise. Drawing on the tenets of patch choice and central place foraging models, Ms. Reeder hypothesizes that fluctuations in the productivity and distribution of resources caused changes in how people used their landscape throughout time and space. The terrestrial environment was broadly characterized by a steady decline in productivity and an apparently steady increase in population, while the marine environment was more variable. It is proposed that people adjusted their settlement patterns to take advantage of new, productive environments or to compensate for reductions in productivity. The high quality of existing archaeological, geological, and ecological data available, along with the ability to store and process large amounts of information using geographic information technology, provide an opportunity to examine human-environment relationships at a larger geographic scale. GIS-based modeling will be used as an analytical tool to investigate both spatial and temporal changes in settlement patterns. This spatial model will be built using the parameters of human behavioral ecology, and will utilize both univariate and multivariate statistics to test the effectiveness of the model and the sufficiency of the sample. The model will also be field-tested in the Carrington Point area on northern Santa Rosa Island. This study will also consolidate dispersed interdisciplinary data into a cohesive database of value to many researchers, and will explore and expand on the application of sophisticated GIS modeling applications to questions about human-environment relationships.

在David Meltzer博士的指导下，Leslie Reeder女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。她将分析考古数据，以确定加州圣巴巴拉海峡群岛上早期的狩猎和采集社会是如何适应上一个冰河时代末期迅速变化的环境条件的。在此期间，海平面迅速上升和全球气候变化重组了许多人赖以生存的海洋和陆地生态系统。这些生态变化在温带沿海地区尤为强烈，那里的海侵和海面温度波动极大地改变了近岸、河口和陆地环境中的可用资源。这一时期与旧大陆农业的早期发展和新世界社会的建立有关，在这一时期，人们加强了与世界大部分地区沿海生态系统的关系。尽管人们的兴趣集中在这一时期，但它的海岸线一直很难研究。许多已经被海平面上升淹没，时间深度使得考古和环境数据难以获得。在加利福尼亚的北海峡群岛上，丰富的古生态、地质、气候和考古记录为研究这些环境变化对古人的影响提供了一个绝佳的机会，而这些岛屿的地理位置在一定程度上保护了它们免受海平面上升的严重影响。根据斑块选择和中心地点觅食模型的原则，Reeder女士假设生产力和资源分布的波动导致了人们在时间和空间上如何利用他们的景观的变化。陆地环境的总体特点是生产力不断下降，人口明显稳定增长，而海洋环境则变化较大。有人建议，人们调整他们的定居模式，以利用新的、富有生产力的环境或补偿生产力的下降。现有的高质量考古、地质和生态数据，以及使用地理信息技术存储和处理大量信息的能力，为在更大的地理范围内研究人与环境的关系提供了机会。基于地理信息系统的建模将作为一种分析工具来研究聚落格局的时空变化。该空间模型将采用人类行为生态学的参数来构建，并将利用单变量和多变量统计来检验模型的有效性和样本的充分性。该模型还将在圣罗莎岛北部的卡灵顿点地区进行现场测试。本研究还将把分散的跨学科数据整合成一个对许多研究人员有价值的有凝聚力的数据库，并将探索和扩展复杂的GIS建模应用程序在人与环境关系问题上的应用。