A Bioarchaeological Test of Warfare Causation Models in the Santa Barbara Channel Area, California: A Question of Chronology

在国家科学基金会的支持下，帕特里夏·兰伯特博士将完成一项历时多年的研究，对南加州沿海圣巴巴拉海峡地区史前狩猎采集社会中的暴力和战争原因进行研究。这笔资金将使兰伯特博士能够对广泛使用的年表获得足够的时间分辨率，从而能够检验这样一个假设，即气候导致的资源压力在史前是该地区战争的一个重要原因。这项研究还将检验这样一种假设，即欧洲的接触改变了该地区狩猎-采集者之间的战争模式，要么助长了这种做法，要么抑制了这种做法。在世界许多地区，与西方民族国家的接触经常被援引为战争的一个重要原因，这表明在这种接触发生之前，这些社会是和平的。圣巴巴拉海峡地区的人类骨骼遗骸是研究的重点，并提供了相对连续的、7500年来人类健康和暴力行为的记录。这些遗骸记录了数千年前的暴力历史，但在这个时间序列的后半部分，即所谓的中期晚期，达到了顶峰。这段时间构成了公元400年至1380年之间的约800年的时间段。健康指标显示，在这段时间内，健康状况出现了最大幅度的下降，并提供了证据，表明该地区在史前曾出现过伤害性暴力行为和健康压力。关于气候的树轮数据进一步表明，这一时期的两个时段(公元650-800年和公元1100-1300年)的特点是严重和持续的干旱。这种明显的相关性表明，环境扰动对当地的食物和水资源产生了负面影响，并支持战争原因的资源压力模型。不幸的是，尽管陆地气候数据是根据历年校准的，但圣巴巴拉海峡地区用于测定该地区大多数墓葬的年代是基于一系列与墓葬相关的珠子和装饰品，只是非常松散地与日历年联系在一起。因此，很难将健康和行为模式的变化与气候扰动和其他事件(如欧洲接触)联系起来。该项目旨在通过一个放射性碳测年计划来解决这些和其他测年问题，该计划将校准年表，从而促进推动这项研究的战争因果模型的测试。这项研究将校准圣巴巴拉海峡地区考古研究的核心年表。为该项目获得的放射性碳年代将通过圣巴巴拉自然历史博物馆档案馆、加州放射性碳数据库(为学者和公众提供免费在线资源)以及与克鲁沃学术出版社签订的合同出版一卷，向在该区域工作的研究人员提供。通过这些方式，该项目将为美国一个考古重要地区的科学研究基础设施做出重大贡献。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Patricia Lambert will complete a multi-year, diachronic study of the causes of violence and war in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of the Santa Barbara Channel Area of coastal southern California. This funding will permit Dr. Lambert to obtain sufficient temporal resolution of a widely employed chronology to permit testing of the hypothesis that climate-induced resource stress was an important cause of war in this region prehistorically. This research will also test the hypothesis that European contact changed patterns of warfare among the hunter-gatherers of this region, either fueling or suppressing its practice. Contact with Western nation-states has often been invoked as an important cause of war in many world regions, suggesting that these societies were peaceful before such contacts occurred. Human skeletal remains from the Santa Barbara Channel area the focal point of the research, and provide a relatively continuous, 7500-year record of human health and violent behavior. These remains document a history of violence that extends back thousands of years, but peaks during the latter part of this temporal sequence in what is known as the Late Middle period. This period constitutes an ~800 year time block dating between A.D. 400-1380. Health indicators show greatest health declines during this time period and provide evidence that injurious violent behavior and health stress coincided in this region prehistorically. Tree ring data on climate further indicate that severe and sustained droughts characterized two blocks of time within this period (A.D. 650-800 and A.D. 1100-1300). This apparent correlation suggests that environmental perturbations negatively impacted local food and water resources, and lend support to the resource stress model of warfare causation. Unfortunately, whereas the terrestrial climate data are calibrated to calendar years, the Santa Barbara Channel area chronology used to date most of the burials from the region is based on a seriation of burial-associated beads and ornaments only very loosely tied to calendar years. Therefore, it is difficult to link changing patterns of health and behavior with climatic perturbations and other events such as European contact. This project is designed to resolve these and other dating issues through a program of radiocarbon dating that will calibrate the chronology and thereby facilitate testing of the warfare causation models that drive this research. The study will calibrate a chronology at the heart of archaeological research in the Santa Barbara Channel area. The radiocarbon dates obtained for this project will be made available to researchers working in the region through the archives of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, the California Radiocarbon Database ( free online resource serving scholars and the general public), and the publication of a volume under contract to Kluwer Academic Publishers. In these ways, this project will contribute substantially to the infrastructure of scientific research in an archaeologically important region of the United States.