NSF Award
1632536
Explaining how humans adapt to climate change and population growth remain central research questions in anthropology and are relevant to contemporary issues. About fourteen thousand years ago, ancestral Native Americans first entered the Great Basin of North America, where they encountered a landscape dominated by large inland lakes and marshes. Although the climate was generally cooler and wetter than today, it was highly variable and experienced dramatic shifts associated with the transition from the Pleistocene to Holocene epochs. Nonetheless, early Native Americans developed a stable adaptation, characterized by a flexible technology and subsistence base, and high mobility that persevered over the ensuing six millennia, but dramatically reorganized with the onset of extreme aridity about 8,000 years ago. Understanding how these first Americans made a living, interacted with one another, and adapted to climatic change is critical to explaining the colonization of the Americas, and how humans adapt to changing environments more generally. The researchers believe that a cooperative organization of labor by gender was the central feature of this adaptation. This work will develop and validate a general model of human adaptation and a predictive model of archaeological site location useful in other academic research and public lands cultural resource management. It will also garner primary data on past climatic and vegetation change that will contribute broadly to understanding of environmental variability in the western United States. In addition to supporting undergraduate and graduate student education, this project will disseminate research findings to the public through coverage from public broadcasting and major events at regional museums. <br/><br/>It is challenging to recover and interpret archaeological evidence of human responses to past climate change from ancient contexts significantly different from modern environments. Gathering the necessary data requires well-grounded theoretical expectations both about where people likely lived and where evidence of their activities has survived. This project adopts such a research strategy by coupling behavioral and geomorphological models to identify and recover evidence of past human habitation along these ancient lake and marsh habitats. This project combines theoretical predictions from behavioral ecology about women?s and men?s subsistence strategies, with sophisticated geomorphological models to predict where they are likely to be preserved in datable buried deposits. Focused on explaining the pre-9,000 year old archaeology of Grass Valley, Nevada, this project entails targeted archaeological field investigations, generating paleoenvironmental reconstructions from pollen profiles and packrat middens, and conducting geochemical explorations of local fine-grained volcanic toolstone quarries. Combined, these data will allow systematic investigation of how early Native Americans adapted to the Pleistocene Great Basin through a period of changing climate. The central theoretical and methodological models developed and tested in the project are generalizable to other contexts, providing a framework to explain processes of human colonization and adaptation around the world.
