Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Human Ecological Integration In Beringia

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Ph.D. candidate François Lanoë, of the University of Arizona, will study the long-term ecological interactions between societies of hunter-gatherers and populations of large terrestrial mammals. The human species has interacted with its environment by means of hunting and gathering life-ways for over 99% of its history. Previous scholarship has described the consequences of some of these interactions, including possible resource extinction caused by overharvesting. The archaeological and paleontological records are particularly well placed to describe and provide interpretations for these ecological dynamics because they generally extend over very long periods of time. Often, however, these issues are studied separately by archaeologists and paleoecologists without real integration of their respective research questions; as a result, perspectives specific to human ecology have so far been under-emphasized. Within this broader context this project will focus on the trophic ecology of hunter-gatherers, how they fit in the trophic networks ("food webs") among other large predators and what their role and impact on the whole ecosystem is. This project is innovative in that it will implement an interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical framework in order to address novel aspects of the sustainable integration of hunter-gatherer societies in ecosystems over the long-term. It will allow a variety of professionals (archaeologists, paleoecologists, theoretical ecologists) to build upon its results.This project will focus on modeling the modes of resource partitioning between humans and other large predators, and their respective impacts on communities of large mammals. It will be conducted in Alaska and Yukon, where societies of hunter-gatherers entered North America for the first time at the end of the Ice Age, between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago. The colonization of this region corresponded to one of the first settlements of the arctic and generally coincided with major turnover in both vegetation and mammalian species, including megafauna extinction. This project will contribute to the knowledge of human settlement and subsistence of central Alaska through the excavation and faunal analysis of selected archaeological sites. In addition, using a combination of paleontological and chemical methods, this research will document feeding interactions among large mammals at the end of the Ice Age. This interdisciplinary dataset will then be used to model and understand how human settlers exploited resources, and how their economical choices impacted the ecosystem as a whole.