Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Influence of Resource Availability on Territoriality

在所有人类社会中，生态条件在形成土地利用和定居系统决策方面发挥着重要作用。先前的人种学和考古学研究表明，在狩猎采集者中，食物资源的丰富性和可预见性决定了群体移动的频率和距离，以及他们是否维持一个防御领土。最近的古代DNA研究表明，在最后一个冰川周期结束时，非洲东部和中南部曾经广泛存在生物相互作用的觅食者开始以小群体的形式生活，几乎没有基因交换。当地的生态条件可能有助于形成狩猎-采集者相互作用的模式，但研究人员缺乏关于采集者如何适应该地区环境变化的土地利用系统的长期数据。研究人员将调查数千年来狩猎动物的分布如何随季节变化，以及这如何影响从考古记录推断的狩猎采集者的土地使用。研究区位于热带地区，这使得重建降雨季节性变得尤为重要，这取决于地球相对于太阳的位置在千年尺度上的变化，并对当地的动植物群落产生巨大影响。该项目将更好地了解小规模社会在面临新的生态条件时影响集体决策的因素，并将这些因素与社会相互作用的变化联系起来。这些知识还将提供一个概念性框架，以了解世界各地传统社会受到气候变化影响时生活方式的变化。研究人员将通过经济防御模型来研究生态和土地利用之间的联系，该模型假设当资源丰富且时空可预测时，人类群体将倾向于建立稳定的领土。具体来说，他们将验证这样一个假设，即这些条件是在末次盛冰期（Last Glacial Maximum）之后，随着现代季风周期的开始而满足的。他们将从四个岩洞遗址收集动物考古学、生物地球化学和年代数据。考古动物遗骸将提供有关过去不同时期哪些物种被猎杀的信息，以及它们如何被运输和利用以响应领土行为。生物地球化学数据将用于重建生态条件，特别是降雨季节性（氧同位素）、植被（碳同位素）和动物迁移（锶同位素）。最后，精确的年代数据（放射性碳测年）将把这些代用物放在地质时间尺度上，并允许与其他古环境和考古记录进行关联。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Ecological conditions play a major role in shaping land use and settlement system decisions across all human societies. Prior ethnographic and archaeological research indicates that among hunter-gatherers abundance and predictability of food resources mediate how often and how far groups move, and if they maintain a defended territory. Recent ancient DNA work has shown that by the end of the last glacial cycle , foragers in eastern and southern-central Africa that had once had widespread biological interactions began to live in small groups with little genetic exchange. Local ecological conditions may have been instrumental in shaping patterns of hunter-gatherer interactions, but researchers lack long-term data on how foragers adapted their land use systems to environmental change in this region. The researchers will investigate how the distribution of game animals varied seasonally over multiple millenia and how this affected hunter-gatherer land use as inferred from the archaeological record. The position of the study area in the tropics makes it especially important to reconstruct rainfall seasonality through time, which depends on millennial-scale changes in the position of the Earth relative to the sun and has enormous impact on local plant and animal communities. This project will provide a better understanding of the factors influencing collective decision-making in small-scale societies when they are confronted with novel ecological conditions and link these factors to changes in social interactions. This knowledge will also provide a conceptual framework to understand changes in lifeways as traditional societies around the world are impacted by climate change. The researchers will investigate the link between ecology and land use through the lens of the Economic Defendability Model, which posits that when resources are abundant and spatiotemporally predictable human groups will tend to establish stable territories. Specifically, they will test the hypothesis that these conditions were met after the Last Glacial Maximum with the onset of the modern monsoonal regimen. They will collect zooarchaeological, biogeochemical and chronological data from four rockshelter sites. Archaeological animal remains will provide information about which species were hunted at different times in the past, and how they were transported and utilized in response to territorial behavior. Biogeochemical data will be used to reconstruct ecological conditions, particularly rainfall seasonality (oxygen isotopes), vegetation (carbon isotopes) and animal migration (strontium isotopes). Finally, precise chronological data (radiocarbon dating) will place these proxies on the geological timescale and allow correlations with other paleoenvironmental and archaeological records.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.