CNH-L: Pastoral Territory as a Dynamic Coupled System

这个跨学科的研究项目将研究导致人类在田园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。该项目将为研究林地-草原-林地循环的动态是否与人类社会行为的脉动相关联提供新的见解。通过对考古和古生态数据的研究，研究人员将提供关于这种长期循环和耦合的程度的新见解，为人类与环境的相互作用提供了另一种视角。该项目将通过完善和测试一个新的理论模型来挑战人类对牧场退化的线性历史的范式特征，该理论模型将牧区领土解释为一个动态耦合系统。通过关注耦合的人类和自然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方法。评估人类领土行为和牧场生态的动态、连锁循环对作为耦合系统的人类环境的发展和可持续性具有更广泛的意义。该项目将为研究生、本科生和高中生提供复杂社会生态系统跨学科研究的教育和培训机会，并将进一步促进美国和中东研究人员之间的合作。利用考古学、生态学、地球化学、古气候和植物学等野外调查方法，对古代环境和人类社会从事畜牧业的物质残留物等替代数据进行恢复和研究。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，并使用现场数据测试耦合动力学模型。他们将采用综合和重复的研究方法，用数据调整模型，并从模型中生成预期的模式。他们将讨论一个普遍的假设，即在过去植被制度中，牧民人口、流动性、领土性和演替过程之间的动态反馈解释了在建筑石头领土标记中观察到的时间脉冲模式。尽管该项目将以阿曼南部狭窄的高原牧场为基础，因为该地区展示了8000年的专门畜牧经济和丰富的考古和古生态记录，但项目发现将对研究美国和其他地方人类与畜牧环境之间的相互作用具有重要意义。本项目由美国国家科学基金会自然与人类系统耦合动力学（CNH）项目资助。

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.