Exploring Long Term Adaptation to Environmental Change

研究人员将进行水下和陆地研究，以了解美洲的觅食民族如何做出决定，使他们能够适应数千年来发生的快速环境变化。在此期间，数十种动物物种最近灭绝或濒临灭绝或迁移到新的土地，植物群落完全改变，湖泊形成，河流泛滥，海平面上升至少40米。然而，考古数据显示，人们不仅适应了这些转变，而且似乎已经繁荣起来，因为在这一时期出现了越来越多的遗址和文物。尽管这些群体完全依赖于狩猎、采集和管理周围世界的可用资源，但他们似乎已经沉着应对了极其迅速和戏剧性的环境变化的挑战。长期以来，研究人员一直希望了解人类的社会、经济和环境系统是如何恢复或不恢复的，而考古学尤其能够提供相关的见解，因为它可以追溯人类系统几个世纪和几千年的历史。对这些觅食社会如何在近5,000年的快速环境波动中设法适应近乎恒定的变化的细致了解，可以深入了解如何使人类系统更具弹性。然而，几乎所有已知的遗址都只包含石器，通常是在半扰动的环境中，严重限制了对社会复原力的了解。然而，佛罗里达一些被淹没的遗址是个例外。从河中发现了数百件骨质和石器工具，一些河道中间的天坑在完整的、可确定年代的沉积物中有大量的考古遗迹。研究小组将在三个地点进行实地考察：两个相邻的水下天坑和一个内部陆地地点。这两个被淹没的地点有可测年的有机物和完整的沉积物序列。与水槽相比，陆地站点可能没有良好的有机保护，但它将提供有关人们没有最大限度地获得淡水的区域的数据。探索人类与动态土地和水景的关系需要三个研究和一个教学组成部分：1）通过时间创建一个历时性的资源可用性模型; 2）通过模拟潜在的资源最大化策略来预测遗址分布; 3）根据这些框架评估盆地的考古记录。先前挖掘的数据将与新的挖掘数据相结合，以测试中心位置觅食模型的实用性。宏观层面（地理空间建模和古环境重建）和微观层面（特征，石器和保存的有机物的内部分析）将结合起来讨论人类在更新世末和全新世早期的使用。同样重要的是，这个项目将培训一些下一代的地质考古学家，教他们如何调查整体景观，并将水线视为一个机会，而不是一个边界，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进行评估，更广泛的影响审查标准。

Researchers will undertake both underwater and terrestrial research to understand how foraging peoples in the Americas made decisions that enabled them to adapt to the rapid environmental changes that occurred over multiple millenia. During this time, dozens of animal species had recently gone extinct or were dying out or migrating to new lands, plant communities completely transformed, lakes were forming, rivers were flooding, and sea levels rose at least 40 meters. Nevertheless, archaeological data show that people not only adjusted to these transformations, but seem to have thrived, as there are ever-increasing numbers of sites and artifacts appearing throughout this span. Although these groups were entirely reliant upon hunting, gathering, and managing resources available in the world around them, they seem to have met the challenge of extremely rapid and dramatic environmental changes with aplomb. Researchers have long wished to understand how human social, economic, and environmental systems are or are not resilient, and archaeology is particularly well placed to provide relevant insight because it can trace human systems over centuries and millennia. Nuanced understanding of how these forager societies managed to adjust to near-constant change over nearly 5,000 years of rapid environmental fluctuations can provide insight into ways to make human systems more resilient. However, nearly all the known sites contain only lithic artifacts, often in semi-disturbed contexts, severely curtailing what can be learned about social resilience. Some submerged Florida sites however are an exception. Hundreds of osseous and lithic tools have been recovered from the river, and some mid-channel sinkholes have extensive archaeological remains within intact, dateable deposits. The research team will conduct fieldwork at three sites: two adjacent submerged sinkholes and one interior terrestrial site. The two submerged sites have dateable organics and intact sediment sequences. The terrestrial site will likely not have good organic preservation compared to the sinks, but it will provide data about an area where people were not maximizing access to freshwater. Exploring human relationships with the dynamic land and waterscape entails three research and one pedagogical component: 1) creating a diachronic model of resource availability through time; 2) generating predictions for site distributions by modeling potential resource maximization strategies; and 3) assessing the archaeological record of the basin in light of these frameworks. Data from prior excavations will be combined with the new excavation data to test the utility of central place foraging models . Macro-level (geospatial modeling and paleoenvironmental reconstruction) and micro-level (intrasite analysis of features, lithic artifacts, and preserved organics) will be combined to discuss human use during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene. Equally important, this project will train some of the next generation of geoarchaeologists, teaching them how to investigate landscapes in their totality and see the waterline as an opportunity, rather than a boundary, giving them the tools to understand and manage submerging and submerged cultural resources.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.