Collaborative Research: Investigating the Linkage Among Environment, Subsistence, and Work Allocation

解释人类如何适应气候变化和人口增长仍然是人类学的中心研究问题，与当代问题相关，并在本项目中得到解决。大约一万四千年前，印第安人的祖先第一次进入北美大盆地，在那里他们遇到了一个由大型内陆湖泊和沼泽组成的景观。尽管当时的气候总体上比现在更冷、更湿润，但变化很大，并且经历了从更新世到全新世的巨大转变。尽管如此，早期的美洲原住民还是发展出了一种稳定的适应能力，其特点是灵活的技术和生存基础，以及在随后的六千年中持续存在的高度流动性，但在大约8000年前极端干旱开始时，这种适应性发生了戏剧性的变化。了解这些第一批美洲人如何谋生、如何相互影响、如何适应气候变化，对于解释美洲的殖民化，以及人类如何更普遍地适应不断变化的环境至关重要。研究人员认为，按性别合作组织劳动是这种适应的核心特征。这项工作将开发和验证人类适应的一般模型和考古遗址位置的预测模型，这些模型在其他学术研究和公共土地文化资源管理中很有用。它还将收集有关过去气候和植被变化的原始数据，这些数据将广泛地有助于了解美国西部的环境变化。除了支持本科生和研究生教育外，该项目还将通过公共广播和地区博物馆的重大活动向公众传播研究成果。恢复和解释人类对过去气候变化反应的考古证据是具有挑战性的，这些证据来自与现代环境明显不同的古代环境。收集必要的数据需要对人们可能居住的地方和他们活动的证据保存在哪里有充分的理论预期。本项目采用这样的研究策略，将行为模型和地貌模型结合起来，在这些古老的湖泊和沼泽栖息地识别和恢复过去人类居住的证据。该项目结合了行为生态学对女性和男性生存策略的理论预测，以及复杂的地貌学模型，以预测他们可能被保存在可确定日期的埋藏沉积物中的位置。本项目以解释内华达州格拉斯谷（Grass Valley） 9000年前的考古为重点，需要进行有针对性的考古实地调查，从花粉剖面和包鼠堆中重建古环境，并对当地细粒火山工具石采石场进行地球化学勘探。综合起来，这些数据将允许系统地调查早期美洲原住民如何通过气候变化时期适应更新世大盆地。在项目中开发和测试的核心理论和方法模型可推广到其他情况，为解释世界各地人类殖民和适应的过程提供了一个框架。

Explaining how humans adapt to climate change and population growth remain central research questions in anthropology, are relevant to contemporary issues, and are addressed in this project. About fourteen thousand years ago, ancestral Native Americans first entered the Great Basin of North America, where they encountered a landscape dominated by large inland lakes and marshes. Although the climate was generally cooler and wetter than today, it was highly variable and experienced dramatic shifts associated with the transition from the Pleistocene to Holocene epochs. Nonetheless, early Native Americans developed a stable adaptation, characterized by a flexible technology and subsistence base, and high mobility that persevered over the ensuing six millennia, but dramatically reorganized with the onset of extreme aridity about 8,000 years ago. Understanding how these first Americans made a living, interacted with one another, and adapted to climatic change is critical to explaining the colonization of the Americas, and how humans adapt to changing environments more generally. The researchers believe that a cooperative organization of labor by gender was the central feature of this adaptation. This work will develop and validate a general model of human adaptation and a predictive model of archaeological site location useful in other academic research and public lands cultural resource management. It will also garner primary data on past climatic and vegetation change that will contribute broadly to understanding of environmental variability in the western United States. In addition to supporting undergraduate and graduate student education, this project will disseminate research findings to the public through coverage from public broadcasting and major events at regional museums. It is challenging to recover and interpret archaeological evidence of human responses to past climate change from ancient contexts significantly different from modern environments. Gathering the necessary data requires well-grounded theoretical expectations both about where people likely lived and where evidence of their activities has survived. This project adopts such a research strategy by coupling behavioral and geomorphological models to identify and recover evidence of past human habitation along these ancient lake and marsh habitats. This project combines theoretical predictions from behavioral ecology about women's and men's subsistence strategies, with sophisticated geomorphological models to predict where they are likely to be preserved in datable buried deposits. Focused on explaining the pre-9,000 year old archaeology of Grass Valley, Nevada, this project entails targeted archaeological field investigations, generating paleoenvironmental reconstructions from pollen profiles and packrat middens, and conducting geochemical explorations of local fine-grained volcanic toolstone quarries. Combined, these data will allow systematic investigation of how early Native Americans adapted to the Pleistocene Great Basin through a period of changing climate. The central theoretical and methodological models developed and tested in the project are generalizable to other contexts, providing a framework to explain processes of human colonization and adaptation around the world.