Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Humans and the Marine Environment: Fishing through Time in Monterey Bay, CA

在Diane Gifford-Gonzalez博士的监督下，Cristie Boone将分析加州中部海岸8000年来人类和海洋环境是如何相互作用的，强调渔业在生存决策中所起的作用。鱼类是该地区考古遗址中发现的一种关键资源，但往往被视为同质类别，而不是生物和行为多样化的资源。捕捉它们所需的不同技术和技能组合很少被考虑。这个项目考察了鱼与其他人类食物的比较，以及鱼在饮食中的作用如何随着时间和空间的变化而变化。布恩女士的分析将重点放在从考古骨骼中识别鱼类物种。它还将获取常见物种的营养分析，以建立猎物排名，并对样本进行直接放射性碳测年，以控制地鼠和其他啮齿动物对考古遗址地层的影响。结果将与过去海洋和陆地环境的数据相结合，以评估人类对重大气候事件的反应。考古学和人类学使用人类行为生态学和最优觅食理论(OFT)研究人类生存已有一段时间。该项目引入了一种建模技术，该技术长期用于生态学，但仅最低限度地应用于人类学，允许对OFT模型进行比目前执行的更细微的探索。动态状态变量建模扩展了分析中可以包括的因素的数量，并可以提供更现实的觅食预测。这个模型可以扩展并应用于许多考古学背景下，人们不得不在决策之间进行权衡。这个项目将解决蒙特利湾人类史前的多种情况，有时甚至是不同的情况。在更广泛的视角下，它探讨了在沿海狩猎-采集环境中，捕鱼与其他生存行为是如何相互作用的，以及它与社会复杂性的出现的关系。目前，渔业管理正试图防止世界鱼类数量下降到完全崩溃的地步。考古研究被认为是描述工业化前捕鱼环境中鱼类种群特征的宝贵长期数据来源。来自分析组合的初步发现已经表明，一些物种今天可能比过去更小。这个项目的教育影响包括为本科生提供重要的实验室机会。几名本科生接受了鱼类考古分析和鱼类比较骨骼制作方面的培训。一名学生利用这些集合创建了自己的研究项目，并在布恩的指导下，分析了两个地点的鱼类遗骸，并在2008年圣克拉拉本科生研究会议上提交了她的论文。这些研究将在地区和国家考古学会议上发表，发表在同行评议的期刊上，以及一个供公众使用的数字数据库和建模代码。

Under the supervision of Dr. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Cristie Boone will analyze how humans and the marine environment interacted over 8,000 years on the central coast of California, emphasizing the role fishing played in subsistence decisions. Fish are a key resource found in the region's archaeological sites, yet are often treated as a homogeneous category, rather than the biologically and behaviorally diverse resource they are. The different technologies and skill-sets necessary to catch them are rarely considered. This project examines how fish compare to other human foods, and how the role of fish in the diet changes over time and space. Ms. Boone's analysis will focus on identification of fish species from archaeological bones. It will also obtain nutritional analyses of commonly encountered species to construct prey rankings, and conduct direct radiocarbon dating of specimens to control for the effects of gophers and other rodents on archaeological site stratigraphy. Results will be combined with data on past marine and terrestrial environments to assess human responses to major climatic events.Archaeology and anthropology have used human behavioral ecology and optimal foraging theory (OFT) to investigate human subsistence for some time. This project introduces a modeling technique, long used in ecology but only minimally applied to anthropology, that permits more nuanced explorations of OFT models than currently performed. Dynamic state variable modeling expands the number of factors that can be included within an analysis, and can provide more realistic foraging predictions. This model can be expanded and applied to numerous archaeological contexts where people had to consider trade-offs between decisions.This project will address the multiple and sometimes divergent scenarios for the Monterey Bay's human prehistory. In a broader perspective, it explores how fishing interacts with other subsistence behaviors in a coastal hunter-gatherer setting and its relation to the emergence of social complexity.Currently fisheries management is attempting to prevent the world's fish populations from declining to the point of complete collapse. Archaeological research is recognized as a valuable source of long-term data to describe fish population characteristics from pre-industrial fishing contexts. Preliminary findings from analyzed assemblages already indicate that some species may be smaller today than they were in the past.This project's educational impacts include providing important laboratory opportunities for undergraduates. Several undergraduates have been trained in archaeological fish analysis and preparation of fish comparative skeletons. One student created her own research project using the assemblages and, under Ms. Boone's instruction, analyzed fish remains from two sites, presenting her paper at the Santa Clara Undergraduate Research Conference in 2008.Research will be presented at regional and national archaeological conferences, published in peer-reviewed journals, and a digital database and the modeling code provided for public use.