Collaborative Research: Examination of Sites on the Georgia Bight Coastline

沿着美国东南部海岸，可以发现50多个贝壳环--巨大的贝类、人工制品和其他食物残留物的圆形沉淀物，环绕着广阔的开放广场。这些遗址可以追溯到远古时代晚期(约5000-3500卡B.P.)，这些遗址出现在南卡罗来纳州和密西西比州之间约2500公里的海岸线上，其中包含该地区第一个大规模定居点的异常完好的证据，尽管它们现在受到海平面上升的严重威胁。在国家科学基金会的支持下，宾厄姆顿大学的马特·桑格博士、佐治亚大学的维克多·汤普森博士和北肯塔基大学的萨德·比塞特博士将研究这些遗址，重点研究以前流动的晚期古人如何适应不断变化的地形(例如，海平面波动)，并建立更大、更复杂和越来越多样化的社会。在寻求解决关于壳环功能的长期分歧的过程中，该项目将产生新的数据和新的模型，这将引起考古学家、人类学家和其他研究人员的兴趣，他们研究美国和世界其他地区大规模人类聚落的早期阶段。对这项研究选择的13个地点进行比较分析，将有助于解决长达数十年的争论，即贝壳环是仪式聚集点、全年村落，还是两者的混合体。同样，这项工作还将考察这种大型晚期古代社区发展背后的因素--即，它们是由早期的封建主义、宗教共同体、广泛的交流系统、本地化的适应，还是日常或断断续续的共同遭遇所驱动。很少有人使用可比的标准和方法对壳环进行系统研究，这使得人们不可能建立可靠的模型，来解释已故的古代环建造者如何或为什么在这些地方发展出更大、更广泛的社会。该项目旨在通过建立将应用于所有壳环地点的现场工作和实验室分析的共享标准，建立一个强大、可靠的壳环数据语料库。合作小组将在乔治亚湾沿岸的13个关键地点进行地球物理调查、挖掘以及辐射和同位素分析。除了测试、提炼和传播对研究贝壳环感兴趣的当前和未来考古学家的最佳实践外，这项工作还将创建一个比较数据集，能够回答关于这些遗址的功能如何随时间和空间变化的关键问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

More than fifty shell rings - large circular deposits of shellfish, artifacts, and other food remains surrounding broad, open plazas - can be found along the southeastern U.S. coast. Dating to the Late Archaic (circa 5,000 - 3,500 cal B.P.), these sites appear across roughly 2,500 km of shoreline between South Carolina and Mississippi and contain exceptionally well-preserved evidence of the first large-scale settlements in the region, though they are now gravely threatened by rising sea levels. With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Matt Sanger of Binghamton University, Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia, and Thad Bissett of Northern Kentucky University will investigate these sites by focusing on how previously mobile Late Archaic peoples adapted to a changing landscape (e.g., fluctuating sea levels) and built larger, more complex, and increasingly diverse societies. In seeking to settle long-standing disagreements over the function of shell rings, this project will generate new data and new models that will be of interest a broad range of archaeologists, anthropologists, and other researchers studying the earliest stages of large-scale human settlement, both in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Comparative analysis across the thirteen sites selected for this study will help resolve a decades-long debate over whether shell rings were ritual gathering points, year-round villages, or a mix of the two. Likewise, this work will also look at factors behind the development of such large Late Archaic communities - namely, whether they were driven by incipient sedentism, religious communality, expansive exchange systems, localized adaptations, or shared encounters on a daily or intermittent basis. Few shell rings have been studied systematically using comparable standards and methods, which has made it impossible to create dependable models for how or why the Late Archaic ring builders developed larger and more expansive societies in these places. This project seeks to create a robust, dependable corpus of data on shell rings by establishing shared standards of fieldwork and laboratory analysis that will be applied across all shell ring sites. The collaborative team will conduct geophysical surveys, excavations, and radiometric and isotopic analyses at thirteen key sites along the Georgia Bight. In addition to testing, refining, and disseminating best practices for current and future archaeologists interested in studying shell rings, this work will create a comparative dataset capable of answering critical questions about how the function of these sites may have varied over time and across space.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.