Exploring Long Term Adaptation to Environmental Change

研究人员将进行水下和陆地研究，以了解美洲的觅食民族如何做出决定，使他们能够适应数千年来发生的快速环境变化。在这段时间里，几十种动物最近灭绝或正在灭绝或迁移到新的土地上，植物群落完全改变，湖泊形成，河流泛滥，海平面上升了至少40米。然而，考古数据表明，人们不仅适应了这些变化，而且似乎还兴旺起来，因为在这段时间内出现了越来越多的遗址和人工制品。尽管这些群体完全依赖于狩猎、采集和管理周围世界的资源，但他们似乎沉着地应对了极其迅速和剧烈的环境变化的挑战。长期以来，研究人员一直希望了解人类的社会、经济和环境系统是如何具有或不具有弹性的，考古学特别适合提供相关的见解，因为它可以追溯到几个世纪和几千年的人类系统。在近5000年的快速环境波动中，对这些觅食社会如何设法适应近乎恒定的变化进行细致入微的理解，可以为使人类系统更具弹性提供洞见。然而，几乎所有已知的遗址都只包含石器文物，通常处于半干扰环境中，严重限制了对社会弹性的了解。然而，佛罗里达的一些水下遗址是例外。从河中发现了数百件骨骼和石器工具，一些河道中间的陷坑中有大量完整的考古遗迹，可追溯日期。研究小组将在三个地点进行实地考察：两个相邻的淹没天坑和一个内陆地面地点。这两个水下遗址有可确定年代的有机物和完整的沉积物序列。与水槽相比，陆地站点可能没有很好的有机保存，但它将提供有关人们没有最大限度地获取淡水的地区的数据。探索人类与动态土地和水景的关系需要三个研究和一个教学组成部分：1)创建资源可用性的历时模型；2)通过对潜在资源最大化策略建模，生成站点分布预测；3)根据这些框架对盆地的考古记录进行评估。先前挖掘的数据将与新的挖掘数据相结合，以测试中心地点觅食模型的实用性。宏观层面（地理空间建模和古环境重建）和微观层面（遗址内特征分析、石器人工制品和保存的有机物）将结合起来讨论更新世晚期和全新世早期人类的使用。同样重要的是，该项目将培训一些下一代地质考古学家，教他们如何从整体上调查景观，并将水线视为机会，而不是边界，为他们提供理解和管理淹没和淹没文化资源的工具。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。

Researchers will undertake both underwater and terrestrial research to understand how foraging peoples in the Americas made decisions that enabled them to adapt to the rapid environmental changes that occurred over multiple millenia. During this time, dozens of animal species had recently gone extinct or were dying out or migrating to new lands, plant communities completely transformed, lakes were forming, rivers were flooding, and sea levels rose at least 40 meters. Nevertheless, archaeological data show that people not only adjusted to these transformations, but seem to have thrived, as there are ever-increasing numbers of sites and artifacts appearing throughout this span. Although these groups were entirely reliant upon hunting, gathering, and managing resources available in the world around them, they seem to have met the challenge of extremely rapid and dramatic environmental changes with aplomb. Researchers have long wished to understand how human social, economic, and environmental systems are or are not resilient, and archaeology is particularly well placed to provide relevant insight because it can trace human systems over centuries and millennia. Nuanced understanding of how these forager societies managed to adjust to near-constant change over nearly 5,000 years of rapid environmental fluctuations can provide insight into ways to make human systems more resilient. However, nearly all the known sites contain only lithic artifacts, often in semi-disturbed contexts, severely curtailing what can be learned about social resilience. Some submerged Florida sites however are an exception. Hundreds of osseous and lithic tools have been recovered from the river, and some mid-channel sinkholes have extensive archaeological remains within intact, dateable deposits. The research team will conduct fieldwork at three sites: two adjacent submerged sinkholes and one interior terrestrial site. The two submerged sites have dateable organics and intact sediment sequences. The terrestrial site will likely not have good organic preservation compared to the sinks, but it will provide data about an area where people were not maximizing access to freshwater. Exploring human relationships with the dynamic land and waterscape entails three research and one pedagogical component: 1) creating a diachronic model of resource availability through time; 2) generating predictions for site distributions by modeling potential resource maximization strategies; and 3) assessing the archaeological record of the basin in light of these frameworks. Data from prior excavations will be combined with the new excavation data to test the utility of central place foraging models . Macro-level (geospatial modeling and paleoenvironmental reconstruction) and micro-level (intrasite analysis of features, lithic artifacts, and preserved organics) will be combined to discuss human use during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene. Equally important, this project will train some of the next generation of geoarchaeologists, teaching them how to investigate landscapes in their totality and see the waterline as an opportunity, rather than a boundary, giving them the tools to understand and manage submerging and submerged cultural resources.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.