Dissertation Research: Reconstruction of Archaeological Landscapes and the Changing Environment on Easter Island

在William Ayres博士的指导下，Joan Wozniak女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。在富布赖特基金会的支持下，沃兹尼亚克女士在复活节岛进行了考古和地质实地考察。在国家科学基金会的资助下，她将获得放射性碳年代，以确定采集的样本的年龄，并签订一系列土壤和植物学分析的合同。她将利用地理信息系统分析来整合和空间组织多组数据。波利尼西亚群岛为研究人类适应提供了一个极好的、几乎是实验室的环境。在相对较短的时间内，波利尼西亚人民航行在广袤的太平洋上，并在许多岛屿上定居。因此，他们从一个共同的文化基础开始。然而，当欧洲人第一次接触到这种社会组织形式时，不同岛屿之间的社会组织形式差异很大，多年来，人类学家一直在努力寻找这种差异中的一种模式。最有说服力的解释将社会组织与自然资源联系起来，并将拥有更多样化资源基础的较大岛屿与更复杂和等级更高的社会系统联系起来。然而，研究人员已经认识到，情况要复杂得多，因为数千年来人类对脆弱的岛屿资源产生了重大影响。人口增长，发展了更精耕细作的种植，在大多数情况下导致了严重的环境退化。这反过来又产生了重大的社会影响。沃兹亚克女士的研究重点是复活节岛上的这一系列互动。考古证据记录了随着时间的推移而发生的社会变化，过度耕作和开发的影响在今天岛上退化的环境中显而易见。但研究人员还没有详细研究行为变量和环境变量之间的复杂交互作用。有了她收集的数据，沃兹亚克可以重建不断变化的居住模式、农业的强度和程度以及景观变化。这项工作不仅将对太平洋地区的人类与环境相互作用产生新的见解，而且还将有助于培养一位有前途的年轻科学家。

Under the direction of Dr. William Ayres, MS Joan Wozniak will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. With support from the Fulbright Foundation MS Wozniak conducted archaeological and geological fieldwork or Easter Island. With National Science Foundation funding she will obtain radiocarbon dates to determine ages of samples collected and also contract for a range of soil and botanical analyses. She will employ geographic information system analysis to integrate and spatially organize multiple sets of data. The islands of Polynesia provide an excellent, almost laboratory, situation in which to study human adaptation. Within a relatively short period of time Polynesian peoples sailed across a vast expanse of the Pacific and settled on a large number of islands. Thus they started from a common cultural base. When first contacted by Europeans however forms of social organization varied widely between islands and for many years anthropologists have worked to find a pattern within this variation. The most convincing explanations have related social organization to natural resources and correlated larger islands with more diverse resource bases to more complex and hierarchical social systems. However researchers have come to realize that the situation is much more complicated because over millennia humans have had substantial impact on fragile island resources. Populations grew, more intensive cultivation developed and in most instances severe environmental degradation resulted. This in turn had substantial social effects. MS Woziak's research focuses on this set of interactions on Easter Island. Archaeological evidence has documented social change over time and the impact of over cultivation and exploitation is evident in the degraded environment on the island today. But researchers have not examined in detail the complex interaction between behavioral and environmental variables. With the data she has collected, MS Woziak can reconstruct changing settlement patterns, intensity and extent of agriculture and landscape changes. The work will not only yield new insight into human and environmental interaction in the Pacific but also assist in training a promising young scientist.