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

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，克里斯托弗·摩根、大卫·罗德和理查德·亚当斯将在怀俄明州西部风河山脉的亚高山和高山地区进行一季的考古研究。该团队汇集了狩猎采集者和山地考古学和生态学、史前定居和生存系统以及古环境重建方面的专家，以解释导致一个被当地称为“高层村”的狩猎采集者村庄异常密集占领的经济、环境和社会背景。这个地点海拔10,700英尺，对于一个狩猎采集的村庄来说，面积非常大（19英亩）。它包含至少52个扁平的房屋地板，代表了古代生活结构的遗迹，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。初步研究的放射性碳定年法表明，该遗址的居住时间在4500年至150年前，使其成为北美最大、最古老、持续时间最长的高海拔史前村庄。风河项目将产生关于北美史前和人类适应高山等边缘栖息地的新的经验和理论信息。它的智力价值在于它在这样的环境中测试了人类行为的基本模型，并用具体的、定量的术语表达了人类是如何以及为什么迁移到这样的地区并定居下来的，并最终占据了地球上几乎每一个陆地生态位。推动这项拟议研究的基本问题是：高层村庄的居民是被迫生活在一个边缘的、有限的栖息地，还是被拉进一个季节性生产力很强的栖息地，以抵消在该地点的生活成本？该项目的目标是通过重建史前在技术和生存方面的投资来回答这些问题，这些投资与生活在该遗址的经济效益有关，高成本，低回报的行为表明人们被推动占领该遗址，以及相反的动机。这项研究需要提供建造房屋、制造工具和喂养居住在该地点的人口所花费的时间和精力的有意义的测量数据，以及在任何时候居住在那里的群体规模的合理估计，所有这些都在整体环境生产力的背景下进行。产生这些类型的数据需要挖掘场地及其房屋特征的大量样本，并分析房屋建造方法，工具类型和生存遗迹以及过去环境条件的其他指标。该项目更广泛的影响在于它参与和培训了大量不同群体的本科生、印第安人和研究生进行尖端的考古研究，扭转了美国学生和历史上被剥夺权利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、华盛顿州）的公立大学中发展了越来越多的科学能力和基础设施。以及从马里兰到加利福尼亚的私人实验室。

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.