Dissertation Research: Lithic Raw Material Procurement Patterns and the Social Landscape in the Central Mesa Verde Region, A.D. 600-1300

在Timothy Kohler博士（也是nsf赞助的“村庄生态动力项目”的PI）的监督下，Fumiyasu Arakawa将调查Mesa Verde中部地区公元600年至1300年的工具石采购模式，该地区包括Dolores山谷，Ute山和科罗拉多州西南部的McElmo/Yellowjacket地区。工具石采购模式反映了领土和土地保有制度的重要方面，表明人们为获得原材料而旅行的距离和频率。为了了解工具石的采购模式，本研究集中研究了各种原材料类型的废品（制造副产品）及其产地到考古遗址的距离。在研究区域已有强大的区域数据集的基础上，将实施与额外的岩石来源识别和额外的碎屑分析相关的狩猎、采集和家庭活动。所收集的数据库将按六个时期组织在一个地理信息系统中，使不同时期之间的差异易于可视化。该地区对石材原材料的空间分布的研究还远远不够，尽管试点研究表明，这些分布在越来越大的分析尺度上（从住宅场地到社区、地方和区域），为土地利用、社区领土和社区互动提供了信息。利用这一数据库获得的关于该区域社会动态的观点将因对该区域的已知情况和正在学习的其他情况而大大加强，并将有助于该区域正在进行的和今后的研究。此外，这项研究是由一名国际（日本）学生进行的，进一步培训了外国研究人员对美国考古方法和理论的了解。关于该地区史前史尚未解决的主要问题（聚集的原因；当地查科人大棚的性质；该地区多种族的可能性；后普韦布洛I和后普韦布洛III人口减少的原因）的相互竞争的假设往往取决于对冲突与合作的社会和空间尺度的不同看法。这项研究将有助于缩小研究领域中这些问题领域的可能模型的范围，从而帮助我们理解世界其他地方类似规模的社会中的类似过程。

Under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Kohler (also the PI of the NSF-sponsored "Village Ecodynamic Project"), Fumiyasu Arakawa will investigate toolstone procurement patterns from A.D. 600 to 1300 in the central Mesa Verde region, a region that includes the Dolores Valley, Ute Mountain, and McElmo/Yellowjacket areas of southwestern Colorado. Toolstone procurement patterns reflect important aspects of territoriality and land-tenure systems by suggesting how far and how often people traveled to obtain raw materials. To understand toolstone procurement patterns, this research concentrates on studying debitage (manufacturing by-products) of various raw material types and the distance from their source areas to archaeological sites. Activities--hunting, gathering, and domestic purposes--related to additional lithic source identification, and additional debitage analysis, will be implemented, building on already strong r egional datasets in the study area. The database assembled will be organized in a geographic information system by six periods, making it easy to visualize differences between periods.The spatial distribution of stone raw materials is greatly understudied in this region, despite the fact that pilot studies indicate that these distributions inform on land use, community territoriality, and community interactions at increasing scales of analysis-from the residential site to the community, locality, and region. The perspectives gained on the social dynamics of the region with this database will be greatly enhanced by what is already known about this region and what else is being learned, and will contribute to ongoing and future studies in this region. Furthermore, this research is conducted by an international (Japanese) student, furthering the training of foreign researchers in American archaeological method and theory.Competing hypotheses for the major, still-unresolved questions concerning this area's prehistory (the causes for aggregation; the nature of the local Chacoan greathouses; the possibility of multiple ethnicities in this region; and the causes of the post-Pueblo I and post-Pueblo III depopulations) often depend on differing views of the social and spatial scales of conflict and cooperation. This research will assist in narrowing the range of possible models for these problem domains in the research area, and thereby help us understand similar processes in societies of similar scale elsewhere around the world.