DDRIG: Soil-Stratigraphy and Landscape Evolution in Subarctic Lowlands: A Paleoenvironmental Framework for Human Colonization and Occupation of Eastern Beringia

该奖项将支持研究生Jennifer Kielhofer重建大约14000年前东白令陆桥史前景观的研究。白令海峡是位于阿拉斯加和俄罗斯之间的地区，目前被白令海覆盖，但14,000年前是干燥的陆地，在大规模的北美冰盖融化导致海平面上升之前。了解这一时期的地貌将使我们深入了解这一时期早期人类在这一地区的迁徙。了解这一点将使科学家和感兴趣的公众更好地了解这些早期移民可利用的资源，以获取食物、住所和衣服。穿越这片土地有多难，需要多长时间。为了全面了解当代印第安人的祖先是如何迁移到北美的，这些问题都是必须回答的。拟议的研究使用埋藏土壤作为景观演变的指标在低地陆地设置的亚北极阿拉斯加中部。这项工作为白令陆桥东部人类殖民提供了一个距今14000至8000校准年的古环境框架。本项目采用“土壤链”的方法，在不同的时空尺度上探索过去土壤形成与气候变化之间的关系。埋藏的土壤通常与阿拉斯加中部的早期考古活动有关，因此了解影响土壤形成和考古记录的环境因素至关重要。许多研究认为，在研究区域，全球千年气候变化与过去土壤形成之间存在联系，但最近的研究认为，局部扰动周期可能对土壤形成产生重大影响。该项目假设更大范围的气候变化和局部扰动周期都会影响土壤的形成，并旨在开发一个高分辨率的微形态（土壤岩石学）数据集来验证这一假设。主要的研究目标是：1)基于研究流域过去海拔样带土壤发育的变化，建立高分辨率的景观演变记录；2)增加陆地古环境记录，并直接与考古数据集进行比较；最后，3)评估低地亚北极环境对人类生态和土地利用的潜在环境影响。

This award will support the research of graduate student Jennifer Kielhofer to recreate the prehistoric landscape of eastern Beringia approximately 14,000 years ago. Beringia is the area between Alaska and Russia that is currently covered by the Bering Sea, but 14,000 years ago was dry land, prior to the rise in sealevel that occurred when the massive North American Ice Sheets melted. Understanding what the landscape looked like at this time will give us insights into the early human migrations across this landscape that occurred during this time period. Knowing this will give scientists and interested members of the public a better understanding of what resources were available for these early migrants to exploit for food, shelter, and clothing. How difficult the landscape was to traverse and how long this would take. These are questions important to answer in order to have a full picture of how the ancestors of contemporary Native American peoples migrated to North America. The proposed research uses buried soils as indicators of landscape evolution within lowland terrestrial settings of subarctic central Alaska. This work provides a paleoenvironmental framework for human colonization of eastern Beringia ~14,000 to 8,000 calibrated years before present (cal. B.P.). Using the "soil catena" approach, this project explores the relationship between past soil formation and climatic variability on various temporal and spatial scales. Buried soils are generally associated with early archaeological occupations in central Alaska, so it is critical to understand the environmental factors that influenced soil formation and the archaeological record. Many studies assert a link between global-scale millennial climatic variability and past soil formation in the study region, but more recent research argues that local disturbance cycles may have had a significant impact on soil formation. This project hypothesizes that both broader scale climatic change and local disturbance cycles influenced soil formation, and aims to develop a high-resolution micromorphological (soil petrographic) dataset to test this hypothesis. Major research objectives are to: 1) develop a highresolution record of landscape evolution, based on changes in past soil development across an elevational transect in the study catchment, 2) augment terrestrial paleoenvironmental records and compare them directly to archaeological datasets, and finally, 3) assess potential environmental impacts on human ecology and land use in lowland subarctic settings.