Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Coastal Resources

本论文项目的目标是了解资源密度和分布在景观的变化如何影响觅食社区的生存策略，流动性和社会连通性。研究人员先前指出，大规模的环境变化影响了植物和动物群落，这可能通过改变资源分布和它们之间的距离来影响人类社会组织。沿海社区对这种变化特别敏感，因为环境变化可能使大片土地退化或暴露。考古调查可以解决这样的问题，因为延长的时间尺度捕捉到资源分布和密度的重复重组。在这一更广泛的背景下，该项目考虑了沿海地区的变化对营养丰富的资源的影响，并询问觅食社区是否通过扩大或缩小其社交网络作出反应。这项研究解决了更大的问题，人类对不断变化的资源分布的反应。 博士生计划使用从沿海考古遗址收集的材料沿着现代海岸线和内陆地区，以更好地评估如何觅食生存策略，流动性和社会联系在时间和空间上受到影响。先前的研究表明，该地区受到多种气候事件的影响，海岸线扩张和收缩，提供了在更广泛的背景下将这些材料重新组合的独特能力。这个项目使用鸵鸟蛋来告知采集者生活的多个维度：生存（蛋作为食物），技术（蛋作为水容器）和社会联系（烧瓶和珠子作为贸易物品）。研究人员计划分析蛋壳的表面、化学成分和有机成分，并提出一个更广泛地使用鸵鸟蛋壳碎片来解决生存和流动问题的模型。通过研究采集者如何使用鸵鸟蛋，可以更好地了解资源分布变化的反应，也可以评估这种反应在多个气候周期中如何变化，这些气候周期对海岸线资源产生了明显的影响。该奖项反映了NSF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。

The goal of this dissertation project is to understand how changes in resource densities and distribution across landscapes impacted subsistence strategies, mobility, and social connectivity of foraging communities. Researchers previously noted that large-scale environmental shifts impacted floral and faunal communities, which likely influenced human social organization by changing resource distributions and the distances between them. Coastal communities are particularly sensitive to such shifts, as environmental changes may submerge or expose large sections of land. An archaeological investigation can address such considerations as the extended timescales capture repeated restructuring of resource distribution and density. Within this broader context, this project considers the impacts of coastal shifts on nutrient-rich resources, and asks whether foraging communities responded by expanding or contracting their social networks. This research addresses larger questions about human response to changing resource distributions. The doctoral student plans to use materials collected from coastal archaeological sites along a modern coastline and one in the hinterland, to better assess how forager subsistence strategies, mobility, and social connectivity were impacted across time and space. Previous research demonstrated that this area was subjected to multiple climatic events where the coastline expanded and contracted, offering a unique ability to situate these materials within a broader context. This project uses ostrich eggs to inform multiple dimensions of forager life: subsistence (eggs as food), technology (eggs as water containers), and social connections (flasks and beads as trade items). Investigators plan to analyze the eggshell surfaces, chemistry, and organic components, and present a model for using ostrich eggshell fragments more broadly to tackle questions of subsistence and mobility. By examining how foragers used ostrich eggs, a better understanding of responses to changes in resource distributions can be determined, as can an assessment of how this response changed over multiple climate cycles that had clear impacts on coastline 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.