Doctoral Dissertaion Improvement Grant: Environment and Culture Change in the Santa Barbara Channel, California, during the Early and Middle Holocene

在David Meltzer博士的指导下，Leslie Reeder女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。她将分析考古数据，以确定加利福尼亚州圣巴巴拉海峡群岛上的早期狩猎和采集社会如何适应上一个冰河时代结束时迅速变化的环境条件。在此期间，海平面的迅速上升和世界范围内的气候变化使许多人赖以生存的海洋和陆地生态系统发生了重组。这些生态变化在温带海岸尤其强烈，那里的海洋海侵和波动的海洋表面温度极大地改变了近岸、河口和陆地环境中的可用资源。这段时间牵涉到旧世界农业的早期发展和新世界社会的建立，人们加强了与世界大部分地区沿海生态系统的关系。尽管人们对这段时间感兴趣，但它的海岸线一直很难研究。许多已经被海平面上升淹没了，时间的深度使得考古和环境数据都很难获得。在加利福尼亚州的北海峡群岛，丰富的古生态、地质、气候和考古记录为研究这些环境变化对古人类的影响提供了一个极好的机会，而这些岛屿的地理位置在一定程度上保护了他们免受海平面上升的严重影响。根据地块选择和中心地点觅食模型的原理，里德女士假设，资源的生产率和分布的波动会导致人们在整个时间和空间内使用景观的方式发生变化。陆地环境的总体特征是生产力稳步下降，人口明显稳步增长，而海洋环境则更加多变。有人建议，人们调整他们的定居模式，以利用新的富有成效的环境，或弥补生产力的下降。现有考古、地质和生态数据的高质量，以及利用地理信息技术存储和处理大量信息的能力，为在更大的地理范围内审查人与环境的关系提供了机会。基于地理信息系统的建模将被用作一种分析工具，以调查定居点模式的空间和时间变化。这个空间模型将使用人类行为生态学的参数来建立，并将利用单变量和多变量统计来检验模型的有效性和样本的充分性。该模型还将在圣罗萨岛北部的卡林顿角地区进行实地测试。这项研究还将把分散的跨学科数据整合到一个对许多研究人员有价值的具有凝聚力的数据库中，并将探索和扩展复杂的地理信息系统建模应用程序在人与环境关系问题上的应用。

Under the direction of Dr. David Meltzer, Ms. Leslie Reeder will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will analyze archaeological data to determine how early hunting and gathering societies on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands in California adapted to rapidly changing environmental conditions at the end of the last Ice Age. During this period, rapidly rising sea levels and worldwide transformations in climate reorganized both the marine and terrestrial ecosystems on which many people depended. These ecological shifts were particularly strong along temperate coasts, where marine transgression and fluctuating sea surface temperatures substantially altered available resources in the near shore, estuarine, and terrestrial environments. This time period has been implicated in the early development of agriculture in the Old World and in the foundation of New World societies, and it saw people intensify their relationship with coastal ecosystems throughout much of the world. In spite of the interest focused on this time period, its coastlines have been difficult to study. Many have been inundated by sea level rise, and the time depth makes both archaeological and environmental data difficult to obtain. On California's Northern Channel Islands, rich paleoecological, geological, climatic, and archaeological records provide a remarkable opportunity to study the effects of these environmental changes on ancient people, while the geographic positioning of the islands has partially protected them from the heavy impacts of sea level rise. Drawing on the tenets of patch choice and central place foraging models, Ms. Reeder hypothesizes that fluctuations in the productivity and distribution of resources caused changes in how people used their landscape throughout time and space. The terrestrial environment was broadly characterized by a steady decline in productivity and an apparently steady increase in population, while the marine environment was more variable. It is proposed that people adjusted their settlement patterns to take advantage of new, productive environments or to compensate for reductions in productivity. The high quality of existing archaeological, geological, and ecological data available, along with the ability to store and process large amounts of information using geographic information technology, provide an opportunity to examine human-environment relationships at a larger geographic scale. GIS-based modeling will be used as an analytical tool to investigate both spatial and temporal changes in settlement patterns. This spatial model will be built using the parameters of human behavioral ecology, and will utilize both univariate and multivariate statistics to test the effectiveness of the model and the sufficiency of the sample. The model will also be field-tested in the Carrington Point area on northern Santa Rosa Island. This study will also consolidate dispersed interdisciplinary data into a cohesive database of value to many researchers, and will explore and expand on the application of sophisticated GIS modeling applications to questions about human-environment relationships.