Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Technological Response To Environmental Variation

圣路易斯华盛顿大学的博士生米卡·琼斯将研究狩猎采集生活方式是如何随着时间的推移而变化的，并随着时间的推移而多样化，以应对大规模的气候和环境波动。研究非粮食生产社会的学者们注意到了资源可获得性和觅食社会组织之间的密切联系。在温带地区，狩猎-采集者之间的变化往往与一年中可获得的野生食物数量的变化有关。在非洲热带等资源季节变化不大的地区，数百年或数千年的气候振荡是小规模人类社会社会和经济变化的更重要驱动因素。然而，气候模式的广泛变化如何影响依赖热带野生资源的人所采取的社会战略，目前还没有得到很好的理解。考古学的深度时间视角为研究长时间内的这种变化提供了一个有用的视角。这项研究将使用考古数据来研究小规模的非粮食生产社会如何适应过去2万年来东非众所周知的气候波动。调查结果将提供有关狩猎-采集社会灵活性在塑造史前东非社会多样性方面所起作用的新信息。这一博士论文研究项目也将进一步促进琼斯女士的学术和智力发展。琼斯将在两个不同的东非背景下研究狩猎-采集行为的变化：乌干达东部潮湿、多产的维多利亚湖盆地和索马里南部对气候更加敏感的半干旱平原。通过比较干湿案例研究，本研究旨在了解当地环境条件在面临生态变化时如何影响狩猎采集决策。利用动物考古学和同位素分析，这项研究将研究变化的狩猎和场地使用策略以及当地的降雨模式，以跟踪觅食生活方式和环境变化的相关性。通过这样做，它将通过提供有关索马里南部史前居民长期存在的新信息，帮助填补今天非洲之角一个具有重要地理意义和政治敏感性的地区不断扩大的数据漏洞。这一奖项反映了国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Mica Jones, PhD Candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will investigate how hunter-gatherer lifeways change and have diversified through time in response to large-scale climatic and environmental fluctuations. Scholars of non-food producing societies have noted close ties between resource availability and the organization of forager societies. In temperate regions, change among hunter-gatherers is often related to shifts in the amount of wild foods available during the year. In areas like the African tropics where resources do not vary significantly from season to season, climatic oscillations over hundreds or thousands of years are more important drivers of social and economic change in small scale human societies. The ways that broad shifts in climate patterns affect social strategies employed by people relying on wild resources in the tropics, however, are not well understood. The deep time perspective of archaeology provides a useful lens for investigating such shifts over long periods of time. This study will use archaeological data to examine the ways small-scale, non-food producing societies adapted to well-known climatic fluctuations over the last 20,000 years in eastern Africa. Findings will provide new information on the role that hunter-gatherer social flexibility had in shaping the social diversity of prehistoric eastern Africa. This doctoral dissertation research project will also further MS Jones academic and intellectual development.Mr. Jones will examine changing hunter-gatherer behavior in two distinct eastern African contexts: the wet, productive Lake Victoria basin of eastern Uganda and the more climatically-sensitive semi-arid plains of southern Somalia. By comparing wet and dry case studies, this research aims to understand how local environmental conditions influence hunter-gatherer decision-making when faced with ecological change. Using zooarchaeological and isotopic analyses, this study will examine changing hunting and site-use strategies as well as local rainfall patterns to track correlations in forager lifeways and environmental changes. In doing so, it will help fill an ever-widening data hole in a geographically important and politically sensitive part of the Horn of Africa today by providing new information on the long-term presence of people in prehistoric southern Somalia.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.