Explaining Prehistoric High-Altitude Hunter-Gather Residential Occupations in Wyoming's Wind River Range

在国家科学基金会的支持下，克里斯托弗·摩根博士、大卫·罗德博士和理查德·亚当斯博士将在怀俄明州西部的风河山脉的亚高山和高山地区进行为期一季的考古研究。该团队汇集了狩猎采集和山地考古与生态学、史前聚落和生存系统以及古环境重建方面的专家，以解释导致狩猎采集村庄被当地称为高层村庄的异常和密集占领的经济、环境和社会背景。该遗址海拔10,700英尺，作为一个狩猎-采集村庄，面积非常大(19英亩)。它包括至少52个被夷为平地的房屋地板，代表着古代活建筑的遗迹，以及由狩猎、植物加工和工具制造遗迹组成的多样化和密集的考古沉积物。初步研究表明，放射性碳年代测定表明，遗址在4500到150年前，使其成为北美最大、最古老、运行时间最长、持续居住的高海拔史前村庄。风河项目将产生关于北美史前和人类对高山等边缘栖息地的适应的新的经验和理论信息。它的智力价值在于它测试了人类在这样的环境中行为的基本模型，并以具体、定量的方式表达了人类如何以及为什么迁移到这些地区并在那里定居，最终居住在地球上几乎每一个陆地生态位上。推动这项拟议研究的根本问题是：高楼村的居民是被迫生活在一个边缘、有限的栖息地，还是他们被拉到一个季节性生产力如此之高的栖息地，以抵消在这个地点的生活成本？该项目的目标是通过重建史前对技术和生计的投资，相对于在遗址生活的经济利益，用高成本、低回报的行为表明人们被强迫占用遗址，以及相反的动机来这样做。这项研究需要提供有意义的数据，衡量建造房屋、制造工具和为居住在现场的人口提供食物所花费的时间和精力，以及对任何时候居住在那里的群体的规模的合理估计，所有这些都是在整体环境生产力的背景下进行的。生成这些类型的数据需要挖掘遗址及其房屋特征的大量样本，并分析房屋建造方法、工具类型和维持生计的遗迹以及过去环境状况的其他指标。该项目的更广泛影响在于它参与并培训了一大批不同的本科生、美国原住民和研究生进行尖端考古研究，扭转了美国学生和历史上被剥夺公民权的群体科学素养下降的趋势，同时在五个州(犹他州、怀俄明州、内华达州、华盛顿州和加利福尼亚州)的公立大学和从马里兰到加利福尼亚州的私人实验室中发展了更强的科学能力和基础设施。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Christopher Morgan, David Rhode and Richard Adams will conduct one season of archaeological research in the subalpine and alpine regions of the Wind River Range, in western Wyoming. The team brings together experts in hunter-gatherer and mountain archaeology and ecology, prehistoric settlement and subsistence systems, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to explain the economic, environmental, and social contexts leading to the anomalous and intensive occupation of a hunter-gatherer village known locally as High Rise Village. This site is at an elevation of 10,700 ft and, for a hunter-gatherer village, very large (19 acres). It contains at least 52 flattened housefloors representing the remains of ancient living structures and a diverse and dense archaeological deposit composed of hunting, plant processing, and tool making remains. Pilot study radiocarbon dating indicates site occupations between 4500 and 150 years ago, making it the largest, oldest, and longest-running, continuously-occupied high-altitude prehistoric village in North America. The Wind River project will generate new empirical and theoretical information about North American prehistory and human adaptation to marginal habitats like high mountains. Its intellectual merit rests on its testing of fundamental models of human behavior in such settings and expressing in concrete, quantitative terms how and why humans move to and settle in such regions, ultimately coming to populate nearly every terrestrial ecological niche on the planet. The fundamental questions driving the proposed research are: were High Rise Village inhabitants pushed to live in a marginal, limiting habitat, or where they pulled into a habitat that was so seasonally productive as to offset the costs of living at the site? The goal of the project is to answer these questions by reconstructing prehistoric investments in technology and subsistence relative to the economic benefits of living at the site, with high-cost, low return behaviors indicating people being pushed to occupy the site, and the opposite incentive for doing the same. This research requires data that provides meaningful measures of the time and energy expended constructing the houses, manufacturing the tools and feeding the populations who lived at the site, as well as a reasonable estimate of the size of the groups who lived there at any one time, all within a context of overall environmental productivity. Generating these types of data entails excavating a large sample of the site and its house features and analyzing house construction methods, tool types and subsistence remains and other indicators of past environmental conditions.The project's broader impacts rest on its engagement and training of a large and diverse group of undergraduates, Native Americans and graduate students in cutting-edge archaeological inquiry, countering trends in declining scientific literacy in American students and among historically disenfranchised groups while developing increased scientific capacity and infrastructure among public universities in five states (Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Washington, and California) and private laboratories from Maryland to California.