Collaborative Research: Spatial Utilization and Social Interaction in Non-Complex Socieites

当今世界上大多数社会都依赖于人类生产的食物，无论是通过农业还是其他方面的景观管理。加州大学伯克利分校的丽莎·马赫博士和塔尔萨大学的丹妮尔·麦克唐纳博士研究了史前中东地区从狩猎、采集和捕鱼过渡到最早的粮食生产社会的长期影响。虽然这种转变是渐进的，非线性的，有很多断断续续的，但对狩猎采集社区的研究相对较少，他们的生活方式为农业的起源和后来的城市化奠定了基础。这项研究探索了这一更早的时期，大约2万年前，通过对一个大型狩猎采集者聚集地点的分析，了解不断变化的社会组织和人类与环境的相互作用，并重建该地点的人们与周围狩猎采集者世界中其他人之间更广泛的社会和经济关系。在这一时期，社会组织机制的变化对于理解狩猎采集群体如何组织自己，以及这些生活方式如何随着食物生产而重新组织，改变人们对自然世界的感知和理解是不可或缺的。结合对狩猎采集者聚集地的挖掘和对职业痕迹、与当代遗址的物质文化联系以及环境记录的分析，可以严格评估史前对波动环境条件的适应以及不同生活方式的可持续性。今天，随着人们投资于以证据为基础的节水战略，这些问题仍然是地方、国家和全球议程的前沿。了解过去的人类，包括采集者和农民对环境和水资源变化的反应，可以提供必要的长期适应记录，并对未来的规划产生重大影响。这项研究与约旦当地社区和机构合作，支持当地倡议，提供有关气候和文化变化的教育，促进遗产保护和环境管理，特别是与当地社区合作。为了解决长期的变化和探索狩猎采集行为的本质在农业的尖端，博士。麦克唐纳和马赫将与一个国际研究小组一起，对约旦该地区最大、最密集的狩猎采集者聚集地的多季节、长时间和重复居住的高分辨率考古记录进行研究。大约2万年前，狩猎采集者从该地区各地聚集在这里，留下了建筑结构、人类墓葬和象征性文物的痕迹，暗示了新兴的村庄定居、经济集约化、与居住和密集景观利用相关的仪式行为，比之前从新石器时代的农业村庄中所知的要早近1万年。通过这些证据，研究人员研究了人们如何融入更广泛的社会互动区域景观，以及他们如何适应不断变化的环境。面对剧烈的环境变化，可持续的生活方式和实践，以及人们如何以及为什么在社会动荡时期建立、维持和有时加强彼此之间的经济和社会联系的动态，这些问题在今天引起了共鸣，至少从狩猎采集向农业过渡以来，这些问题是人类行为的重要方面。从这种对过去社会的详细考古研究中，我们可以学到很多关于当今全球粮食和气候挑战的原因，以及人们如何发展彼此之间富有成效的关系和应对这些挑战的景观的策略。

Most of the world's societies today rely on food produced by humans, whether by farming or other aspects of landscape management. Dr. Lisa Maher, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Danielle Macdonald, of the University of Tulsa, examine the long-term impacts of the transition from hunting, gathering, and fishing to the earliest food-producing societies in prehistory located in the Middle East. While this transition was gradual and nonlinear, with lots of fits and starts, comparatively little research has been done on the hunter-gatherer communities whose lifeways set the stage for the origins of agriculture and later urbanization. This research explores this earlier period, approximately 20,000 years ago, to understand changing social organization and human-environment interactions through the analysis of a large hunter-gatherer aggregation site, and to reconstruct the broader social and economic relationships between people at this site and others in the surrounding hunter-gatherer world. Changes in the mechanisms of social organization during this time are integral to understanding how hunter-gatherer groups organized themselves and how these lifeways were re-organized with food-production, changing how people perceived and understood the natural world. Combining excavations at a hunter-gatherer aggregation site with analysis of occupation traces, material culture ties to contemporary sites, and environmental records permits rigorous evaluation of prehistoric adaptations to fluctuating environmental conditions and the sustainability of different lifeways. Today, these issues remain at the forefront of local, national and global agendas as populations invest in evidence-based water conservation strategies. Understanding the responses of past people, foragers and farmers alike, to changing environmental and water resources provides a necessary long term record of adaptation and has great impact for future planning. Partnering with local Jordanian communities and institutions, this research supports local initiatives to provide education about related climate and culture change and promote heritage conservation and environmental stewardship, particularly with local communities. To address long-term changes and explore the nature of hunter-gatherer behavior at the cusp of agriculture, Drs. Macdonald and Maher, along with an international team of researchers, will examine the high-resolution archaeological record of multi-season, prolonged and repeated habitation of the region's largest and densest hunter-gatherer aggregation site in Jordan. Here, ~20,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers congregated from across the region, leaving traces of architectural structures, human burials, and symbolic artifacts, hinting at emerging village settlement, economic intensification, and ritual behaviors associated with dwelling and intensive landscape use almost 10,000 years earlier than previously known from Neolithic farming villages. Through these lines of evidence, researchers examine how people were integrated into a broader regional landscape of social interaction and how they adapted to the changing environment. Issues of resilience in the face of dramatic environmental change, sustainable lifeways and practices, and dynamics of how and why people establish, maintain and, sometimes, strengthen economic and social connections to each other during times of social upheaval resonate today, and were important aspects of human behavior from at least the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture. There is much to be learned about the causes of global food and climate challenges today from this kind of detailed archaeological study of past societies, as well as about strategies for how people developed productive relationships with each other and the landscape to address such challenges.