Incorporation of Near Surface Geophysical Methods to Household and Village Survey

科林·格里尔博士，沿着来自华盛顿州立大学和不列颠哥伦比亚省大学的跨学科学者团队，将进行研究，以建立北美太平洋西北部萨利希海地区古代雪松木屋的足迹和内部组织。这些大房子，以及居住在其中的复杂的多户家庭，一直是社会的经济引擎，也是过去五千年来管理和维护资源的规模。因此，对小规模社会的调查将提供基本数据，以了解小规模社会如何有效地组织经济、人员和资源，促进地方一级的可持续性和复原力。西北海岸生活方式的研究，其重点是当地的资源管理和分散的决策，可以揭示潜在的新战略和选择，重塑目前的社会实践，以实现更大的可持续性。考古学特别适合于解决这些目标，因为它考虑了一系列具有多种不同组织原则的社会。该项目将为研究生和本科生提供这些日益重要的地球物理技术方面的尖端培训。此外，面对海平面上升，方法学的进步将为从全球受威胁的沿海考古记录中方便地收集关键的考古数据提供一种机制。格里尔博士和他的团队将采用地球物理勘探方法，这是一套用于可视化考古遗址地下而无需挖掘的技术。传统的考古挖掘既昂贵又耗时，这导致该地区有记录的房屋和村庄样本非常有限。地球物理方法可以提供一种低影响的替代方法，但它们仅在西北海岸以有限的方式应用。研究人员将开发一种严格的方法，将地质雷达和磁力测量等地球物理技术产生的信号与特定的埋藏考古特征联系起来。他们将生成一个预测模型，并使用有限的“地面探测”挖掘来评估预测。考古遗址是一种不可再生资源，如果系统地应用地球物理方法，可以提供一种以最小影响获取大量数据的手段，这种方法符合第一民族/美洲土著部落的利益，对文化资源管理从业人员和公众/联邦土地管理者。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值的支持和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Dr. Colin Grier, along with an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Washington State University and the University of British Columbia, will conduct research to establish the footprint and internal organization of ancient cedar plankhouses in the Salish Sea region of the Pacific Northwest of North America. These large houses, and the complex multifamily households that resided in them, have been the economic engines of the society and the scale at which resources were managed and maintained over the last five millennia. Investigations of plankhouses will therefore provide foundational data for understanding how small-scale societies can effectively organize economics, people and resources in ways that promote sustainability and resilience at the local level. The study of Northwest Coast lifeways, with its emphasis on local management of resources and decentralized decision making, can reveal potentially new strategies and options for reshaping current social practices towards greater sustainability. Archaeology is particularly suited to address these goals because it considers a range of societies with multiple different organizational principles. The project will provide cutting-edge training for graduate and undergraduate students in these increasingly important geophysical techniques. Moreover, in the face of rising sea levels, the methodological advances that will result offer a mechanism to expediently collect critical archaeological data from the globally-threatened coastal archaeological record.Dr. Grier and his team will employ geophysical prospection methods, a set of techniques used to visualize the subsurface of archaeological sites without excavation. Traditional archaeological excavation is both costly and time consuming, which has resulted in a very limited sample of well-documented houses and villages for the region. Geophysical methods can provide a low-impact alternative, but they have been applied only in a limited way on the Northwest Coast. The researchers will develop a rigorous methodology for connecting the signals generated by geophysical techniques, such as ground penetrating radar and magnetometry, to specific buried archaeological features. They will generate a predictive model and evaluate predictions using limited "ground-trothing" excavation. Archaeological sites are a non-renewable resource, and geophysical methods, if systematically applied, can provide a means to acquire substantial data with minimal impacts, an approach consistent with the interests of First Nations/Native American Tribes, and useful for Cultural Resource Management practitioners and Public/Federal land managers.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.