Explaining Prehistoric High-Altitude Hunter-Gather Residential Occupations in Wyoming's Wind River Range

在国家科学基金会的支持下，克里斯托弗·摩根博士、大卫·罗德博士和理查德·亚当斯博士将在怀俄明州西部温德河山脉的亚高山和高山地区进行一个季节的考古研究。该团队汇集了狩猎采集者和山区考古学和生态学，史前定居和生存系统以及古环境重建方面的专家，以解释导致当地称为高层村的狩猎采集者村庄异常和密集占领的经济，环境和社会背景。该遗址海拔10，700英尺，对于一个狩猎采集村庄来说，非常大（19英亩）。它包含了至少52个扁平的房屋地板，代表了古代生活结构的遗迹，以及由狩猎，植物加工和工具制造遗迹组成的多样而密集的考古存款。放射性碳测年的初步研究表明，遗址在4500年至150年前被占领，使其成为北美最大，最古老，运行时间最长，持续被占领的高海拔史前村庄。风河项目将产生关于北美史前史和人类适应高山等边缘栖息地的新的经验和理论信息。它的学术价值在于它测试了人类在这种环境中行为的基本模型，并以具体的、定量的方式表达了人类如何以及为什么迁移到这些地区并定居下来，最终在地球上几乎每一个陆地生态位上定居。推动拟议研究的基本问题是：高层村居民被迫生活在一个边缘，限制栖息地，或在那里他们拉到一个栖息地，是如此季节性生产，以抵消生活在现场的成本？ 该项目的目标是回答这些问题，通过重建史前的技术和生计投资相对于生活在现场的经济利益，高成本，低回报的行为表明人们被推到占用现场，并做同样的相反激励。这项研究需要的数据，提供有意义的措施的时间和能源花费的建设房屋，制造工具和喂养人口谁住在网站，以及合理的估计群体的规模谁住在那里在任何一个时间，所有在整体环境生产力的背景下。生成这些类型的数据需要挖掘大量的遗址样本及其房屋特征，并分析房屋建造方法，工具类型和生存遗迹以及过去环境条件的其他指标。该项目更广泛的影响在于其参与和培训了大量不同的本科生，美洲原住民和研究生进行尖端考古调查，对抗美国学生和历史上被剥夺公民权的群体中科学素养下降的趋势，同时在五个州（犹他州、怀俄明州、内华达州、华盛顿和加州）的公立大学和从马里兰州到加州的私人实验室中提高科学能力和基础设施。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Christopher Morgan, David Rhode and Richard Adams will conduct one season of archaeological research in the subalpine and alpine regions of the Wind River Range, in western Wyoming. The team brings together experts in hunter-gatherer and mountain archaeology and ecology, prehistoric settlement and subsistence systems, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to explain the economic, environmental, and social contexts leading to the anomalous and intensive occupation of a hunter-gatherer village known locally as High Rise Village. This site is at an elevation of 10,700 ft and, for a hunter-gatherer village, very large (19 acres). It contains at least 52 flattened housefloors representing the remains of ancient living structures and a diverse and dense archaeological deposit composed of hunting, plant processing, and tool making remains. Pilot study radiocarbon dating indicates site occupations between 4500 and 150 years ago, making it the largest, oldest, and longest-running, continuously-occupied high-altitude prehistoric village in North America. The Wind River project will generate new empirical and theoretical information about North American prehistory and human adaptation to marginal habitats like high mountains. Its intellectual merit rests on its testing of fundamental models of human behavior in such settings and expressing in concrete, quantitative terms how and why humans move to and settle in such regions, ultimately coming to populate nearly every terrestrial ecological niche on the planet. The fundamental questions driving the proposed research are: were High Rise Village inhabitants pushed to live in a marginal, limiting habitat, or where they pulled into a habitat that was so seasonally productive as to offset the costs of living at the site? The goal of the project is to answer these questions by reconstructing prehistoric investments in technology and subsistence relative to the economic benefits of living at the site, with high-cost, low return behaviors indicating people being pushed to occupy the site, and the opposite incentive for doing the same. This research requires data that provides meaningful measures of the time and energy expended constructing the houses, manufacturing the tools and feeding the populations who lived at the site, as well as a reasonable estimate of the size of the groups who lived there at any one time, all within a context of overall environmental productivity. Generating these types of data entails excavating a large sample of the site and its house features and analyzing house construction methods, tool types and subsistence remains and other indicators of past environmental conditions.The project's broader impacts rest on its engagement and training of a large and diverse group of undergraduates, Native Americans and graduate students in cutting-edge archaeological inquiry, countering trends in declining scientific literacy in American students and among historically disenfranchised groups while developing increased scientific capacity and infrastructure among public universities in five states (Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Washington, and California) and private laboratories from Maryland to California.