Human Occupation Of Persistent Coastal Environments

亚利桑那州立大学的埃里希·费舍尔博士和来自南非和其他许多国家的同事将研究在冰川和间冰期期间，狩猎采集者是如何在持续的沿海环境中生活的。多年来，学者们一直在研究人类在面临生态压力时如何与环境互动。与现代人一样，史前狩猎-采集者也因当地环境的变化而调整了他们的生存、技术和社会行为。这些适应影响了他们吃什么，住在哪里，他们制作了什么工具，以及他们如何相互作用等。考古科学非常适合于研究人与环境之间的长时间跨度-跨越数百年到数万年-因为这种行为变化可以在多变量考古记录中检测到。海岸带是充满活力和丰富的环境，拥有丰富、多样和可预测的食物和其他资源。学者们对沿海环境可能支持甚至保护生活在这些地方的人类免受更大的生态变化的影响的方式很感兴趣，这些变化对生活在内陆地区的人类群体造成了不利影响。然而，由于冰川时期海平面的变化，许多海岸线的位置移动了数十到数百公里，这些记录中仍然存在相当大的差距。因此，了解狩猎-采集者如何在很长一段时间内适应沿海地区，以及这些群体与生活在内陆的人口相比如何，可以为人类利用生存、社会和技术战略在动态环境中调解生态压力提供新的见解。它还为科学界提供了一个更广泛的参照点，以了解人类对沿海环境的影响，从而为21世纪的海洋和海岸保护战略提供信息。南非拥有最古老和最丰富的人类沿海占领记录之一。这项研究项目集中在南非东海岸，那里非常狭窄的大陆架在冰川时期限制了海岸线的运动。这防止了大规模的海岸线运动，并创造了稳定的沿海生态系统。在其中一个被称为蓬杜兰的地方，P5项目已经恢复了最后一次冰川盛期(约26,000-19,000年前)期间海岸占领和资源使用的罕见记录。这些记录提供了一个独特的机会，可以研究长期生活在稳定的沿海环境中的狩猎采集者，并将他们行为的证据与生活在内陆的狩猎采集群体进行比较。该项目汇集了来自众多国际大学和学科的研究人员，以回答有关庞多兰海岸线沿线独特而持久的环境中人类行为演变的复杂问题。将从两个沿海考古遗址的发掘中收集详细的考古、动物考古和古环境信息，以及系统的景观研究和现代植物食物和海岸觅食的民族志观察的数据集。这项研究将产生新的证据，以测试有关冰川和间冰期海岸生态变异性的问题，以及这些变化如何影响狩猎-采集食物选择模式、社会网络、定居模式和技术。将这些数据置于更广泛的南部非洲古陆景观中，将使人们重新关注狩猎采集者在冰川和间冰期周期中对沿海和内陆资源的利用，并将在广泛的生物地理背景下提供对人类进化和社会复杂性的更微妙的理解。因此，该项目的跨学科数据集将提供对过去人类行为的详细洞察，人类对沿海生态的长期影响，影响各种生物群落的当地环境变化，以及为子孙后代保护这些资源的新方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Dr. Erich Fisher, of Arizona State University, and colleagues from South Africa and many other nations will study how hunter-gatherers lived in persistent coastal contexts during glacial and interglacial phases. For many years, scholars have studied how people interact with their environment when faced with ecological pressures. Like modern people, prehistoric hunter-gatherers are known to have adapted their subsistence, technological, and social behaviors in response to changes in their local environments. These adaptations influenced, among other things, what they ate, where they lived, what kinds of tools they made, and also how they interacted with each other. The archaeological sciences are ideally suited to studying the relationship between people and their environment over long timespans - spanning centuries to tens of thousands of years - because these kinds of behavioral changes can be detected in the multivariate archaeological record. Coastal zones are dynamic and rich environments with abundant, diverse, and predictable foods and other resources. Scholars have been intrigued by the way coastal environments may have supported and even protected humans living in these places from larger ecological changes that detrimentally affected human groups living in inland locations. Yet considerable gaps remain in these records due to changes in sea levels during glacial phases that shifted the locations of many coastlines by tens to hundreds of kilometers. Understanding how hunter-gatherers adapted to coastal zones over long timeframes, and how these groups compared to populations living inland, therefore, provides new insights into the ways that humans used subsistence, social and technological strategies to mediate ecological pressures in dynamic environments. It also gives the scientific community a broader point of reference for understanding human impacts on coastal environments, which can inform 21st century marine and coastal conservation strategies. South Africa has one of the oldest and richest records of human coastal occupation. This research project focuses on South Africa's East Coast where very narrow continental shelf has limited coastline movements during glacial periods. This prevented large coastline movements and created stable coastal ecosystems. In one these places, known as Pondoland, rare records of coastal occupation and resource use during the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 26,000-19,000 years ago) have already been recovered by the P5 Project. These records provide a unique opportunity to study hunter-gatherers living in stable coastal contexts over long time periods and compare evidence of their behaviors to hunter-gatherer groups living inland. The project synergizes researchers from numerous international universities and disciplines to answer complex questions about the evolution of human behavior in a unique and persistent environment along Pondoland's coastline. Detailed archaeological, zooarchaeological, and paleoenvironmental information from excavations at two coastal archaeological sites will be collected as well as datasets from systematic landscape studies and ethnographic observations of modern plant foods and coastal foraging. The research will generate new evidence to test questions about coastal ecological variability across glacial and interglacial periods and how these changes impacted hunter-gatherer food-choice patterns, social networks, settlement patterns, and technology. Situating these data within the broader southern African paleolandscape will bring renewed focus on hunter-gatherer's use of coastal and inland resources across glacial and interglacial cycles and it will provide a more nuanced understanding of human evolution and social complexity across broad bio-geographical contexts. The project's interdisciplinary datasets, therefore, will provide detailed insights into past human behavior, humans' long-term impacts on coastal ecology, local environmental changes that influenced various biotic communities, and new methods to conserve these resources for future generations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.