Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Formal Modeling Of Raw Material Procurement

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The decisions that people make in regards to the choice and movement of raw materials for technology is a crucial question in the social sciences that has important impacts on all societies, from small to large scale. Researchers will study through computer and mathematical modeling integrated with archaeological data how early modern humans moved around the landscape, organized their technology, and made choices of raw materials for stone tool manufacture when they faced major climatic and environmental change during formative periods of evolution. Past scholarship on these relationships has relied on informal (qualitative) models. In this research raw materials are considered either to be specifically and directly selected for a certain quality, or raw materials are opportunistically selected when encountered on the landscape, using formal logic-grounded modelling that allows for pin-pointing why a model is wrong or not. In the social sciences, there is growth in the development of formal modeling of human behavior and social and cultural systems. All models must begin simply, and this research, through its use of two simple models, will illustrate how formal models can be applied to questions of technological change and the procurement of materials and thus contribute to that ongoing development of social science modeling. The researchers will seek out and work with undergraduates at Arizona State University (ASU) to assist in expanding the models thus contributing to STEM-based education in the social science. On completion, the models will be used a teaching experience for undergraduate students at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa and ASU. Additionally, the model framework that will be produced by the researchers can be applied to other examples of tool resource choice regardless of raw material type in archaeological sequences throughout the world.The researchers will examine the role and importance of stone tool raw materials in the technological organization and mobility strategy of early modern humans when facing major climatic and environmental change during the Middle to Late Pleistocene in the Mossel Bay region on the south coast of South Africa. Using excellent high-resolution climate/environmental and archaeological data from this region, the researchers will contrast two formal models, test different hypotheses drawn from those models and the effects independent variables have on the selection of stone tool raw materials. This endeavor will highlight which raw materials were more time-efficient to use during changing environmental and behavioral contexts, and will provide valuable data on the choices early humans made regarding raw materials that will be integrated into a comprehensive computational model of hunter-gatherer resources that include food resources. Ultimately the researchers will provide needed clarity as to whether the cultural adaptive response to climatic and environmental change during the formative periods of our modern human evolution was driven by a mobility strategy that precluded any specific investment in stone technology and only prioritized moving people to the food resources, or if the response was an increased reliance on technological innovation facilitated by strategic selection of raw materials that demanded technical insight in raw material characteristics.