CNH-L: Pastoral Territory as a Dynamic Coupled System

这一跨学科研究项目将研究导致人类在牧场生态系统中的领土行为的环境条件，以及领土如何塑造环境。该项目将为林地-草原-林地自行车的动态是否与人类社会行为的脉冲相结合提供新的见解。通过对考古和古生态数据的研究，研究人员将提供新的见解，了解这种长期的循环和耦合在多大程度上提供了关于人类与环境相互作用的不同视角。该项目将通过提炼和测试一种新的理论模型，将牧区属地解释为一个动态耦合系统，从而挑战人类逐渐退化牧场土地的线性历史的范式特征。通过关注人类和自然耦合系统的变化和连续性的非线性动力学，该项目将为研究史前社会的变化和连续性提供一种新的概念性方法。评估人类领土行为和牧场生态的动态、相互关联的循环对人类环境作为耦合系统的发展和可持续性具有更广泛的影响。该项目将为研究生、本科生和高中生提供跨学科研究复杂社会生态系统的教育和培训机会，并将进一步促进美国和中东研究人员的合作。调查人员将在实地考察中使用考古学、生态学、地球化学、古气候和植物学方法，恢复和研究古代环境和人类社会从事畜牧业的材料残留物。该研究小组包括来自美国、英国、德国和阿曼的研究人员，他们将使用基于主体的模型来检查人类和自然系统的相互作用，并用现场数据来测试耦合动力学模型。他们将采用一种综合和反复的研究方法，用数据调整模型，并从模型中生成预期的模式。他们将解决一个普遍的假设，即在过去的植被制度中，牧民人口、流动性、属地和演替过程之间的动态反馈可以解释在建筑石材领土标志中观察到的按时间顺序的脉冲模式。尽管该项目将以阿曼南部狭窄的高原牧场为基础，因为该地区拥有8000年的纯牧区经济和丰富的考古和古生态记录，但该项目的发现将对研究美国和其他地方随着时间的推移人与牧区环境之间的互动具有重要意义。该项目得到了美国自然与人类耦合系统动力学(CNH)计划的支持。

This interdisciplinary research project will examine the environmental conditions that lead to human territorial behavior in the pastoral ecosystems as well as how territoriality shapes the environment. The project will provide new insights into whether the dynamics of woodland-grassland-woodland cycling are coupled with pulses in human social behavior. Through their examination of archaeological and paleoecological data, the investigators will provide new insights regarding the degree to which such long-term cycling-and-coupling provides alternative perspectives about human-environmental interaction. The project will challenge paradigm characterizations of a linear history of progressive human degradation of pasture lands by refining and testing a new theoretical model that explains pastoral territoriality as a dynamic coupled system. By focusing attention on the nonlinear dynamics of change and continuity in coupled human and natural systems, the project will provide a new conceptual approach for examining change and continuity in prehistoric societies. Assessment of dynamic, interlocked cycles of human territorial behavior and rangeland ecology have broader implications for development and sustainability of human environments as coupled systems. The project will provide education and training opportunities for graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in the transdisciplinary study of complex social-ecological systems, and it will further collaborations between researchers in the U.S. and the Middle East.Using archaeological, ecological, geochemical, paleoclimate, and botanical methods in fieldwork, the investigators will recover and study proxy data as the material residues from ancient environments and human societies that have been engaged in pastoralism. The research team, which includes researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Oman, will use agent-based models to examine the interactions of human and natural systems and to test the model of coupled dynamics with data from the field. They will employ an integrative and reiterative research approach, tuning models with data and generating expected patterns from models. They will address a general hypothesis that dynamic feedbacks among pastoralist demography, mobility, territoriality, and processes of succession in past vegetation regimes account for the observed pattern of chronological pulses in building stone territorial markers. Although this project will be based in the narrow plateau pasturelands of southern Oman because that region exhibits 8,000 years of exclusively pastoral economy and a rich archaeological and paleoecological record, project findings will have significant implications for examining interactions between people and pastoral environments over time in the U.S. and elsewhere. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.