Ben Fitzhugh - US grants

The dissertation examines human responses to environmental risks reflected by prehistoric settlement and land-use patterns within the context of changing population densities on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Site features and locations will be examined in relation to each other and to projected resources. With the combined advantages of well preserved and highly visible archaeological sites, ongoing geomorphological and paleoenvironmental reconstruction and the use of Remote Sensing and GIS, this research promises to contribute to the anthropological understanding of culture change and the emergence of complex hunter-gatherer social systems in the north.

With National Science Foundation support, Mr. Chris Koonooka will attend the University of Washington's archaeological field school to be held on Kodiak Island (Alaska) from June 20 to August 10, 1998 The program will be conducted at and around the Tanginak Spring site and is designed to give students a broad range of training in archaeological techniques. Field instruction will include training in archaeological surveying, mapping, excavation, note-taking and photography. Laboratory instruction will focus on cleaning, cataloging, artifact analysis and elementary computer mapping. Mr. Koonooka is a Native Alaskan from St. Lawrence Island and is enrolled in the Department of Education at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He will be the first member of the St. Lawrence community to receive formal training in archaeology and will return to the island to teach young people what he has learned. Although Native American prehistory has formed an important archaeological focus for well over a century, almost no Native Americans have participated in the research process. This grant is part of a larger initiative by the NSF Archaeology Program to change this situation. St. Lawrence Island contains important archaeological resources and it will be extremely important to have an individual such as Mr. Koonooka involved in their management.

DEB-9910410

This project is designed to survey and test recently discovered archeological sites on Onekotan Island, Russia, in the northern Kuril Island archipelago. In 1996, NSF- supported biologists surveying the biodiversity of the archipelago found this site in a short and deeply incise stream valley a few hundred meters from the current shoreline. Detailed analysis of field photographs and remote sensing indicates that these may be Ainu in origin, and date from the early-to mid-Holocene. The current biological composition of the Kuril Archipelago is the product of a long biogeographic history, and humans are expected to have played a significant role in this history as competitors and predators. Archeological deposits also have the potential to preserve evidence of prehistoric flora and fauna that have been extirpated or gone extinct. Two concurrent teams will systematically map and sample the Onekotan site in a first attempt to document the human and paleo-ecological history of the site and surroundings, the spatial organization of structures, and the local ecology and geology and geomorphology. In addition, a second team will conduct a lower resolution archeological and geomorphological survey of the surrounding islands to generate contextual information about the broader settlement and biological impact of the Ainu. This project is supported under the guidelines of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research program.

ABSTRACT
OPP#0425349

This is a dissertation proposal to study the acquisition of driftwood as a fuel in subsistence strategies. Using archaeological evidence, contemporary and historic driftwood surveys, and ethnographic interviews the CoPI will investigate fuelwood availability and harvesting strategies in the Kodiak archipelago. In addition the researchers propose to evaluate the possible impacts of climate change, resource depression and logging, on fuelwood harvesting. In addition to the research, the project is exemplary in its inclusion of local students in the research through education projects.

ABSTRACT
OPP- 0451214

This project is to provide support for Dr. Ben Fitzhugh's participation in the ongoing effort to draft a social science plan for research on human-environmental dynamics in the Bering Sea. The funds will be utilized to support the drafting of the science plan, the vetting of the plan with the Arctic social science research community and the Bering Sea indigenous communities, and to integrate the draft social science plan with the existing Bering Sea Ecosystem Study (BEST) draft plan. The ultimate development of these two research plans is part of the broader Interagency program, SEARCH, which seeking to gain insight into the rapid environmental changes occurring in the Arctic.

Larkin Hood, under the supervision of Dr. Benjamin Fitzhugh, will conduct a study of pottery made by prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups on the upper Texas coastal plain during the Late Prehistoric and Contact periods (600 A.D.-1700 A.D.). This research will clarify the role of pottery production and use among hunter-gatherers, and will provide a better understanding of the diverse roles pottery has played in prehistoric societies. Traditionally anthropologists have associated pottery production and use with the intensive food processing and storage tasks of sedentary societies who produce their own food. More recent hypotheses suggest that ceramic vessels function as tools to gain and maintain economic, social and political prestige. Archaeologists continue to document examples of pottery manufacture and use by relatively mobile groups with little social ranking who hunted and gathered wild game and plants. Yet the specific roles of ceramic containers in hunter-gatherer social and economic systems remain unclear, and previous hypotheses do not adequately explain why some hunter-gatherer societies make and use pottery. The upper Texas coastal plain is an ideal area for this study because it is home to a long-standing prehistoric record of pottery made and used by indigenous hunter-fisher-gatherers. Groups in this area appear to have maintained relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer ways of life even as neighboring pottery-producing groups such as the Caddo began to cultivate domesticated plants, settle in villages, and create large earth monuments, and organize in social hierarchies. In order to determine the economic and social roles of pottery in upper Texas coastal plain, potsherds from three sites will be analyzed using the following methods: 1) analysis of scratches, pits, and other types of wear on over 5,000 potsherds to determine how food and other materials were processed in the vessels; 2) analysis of mineral inclusions (petrography) in the vessel bodies to detect how much people moved on the landscape; 3) analysis of organic residues absorbed in the vessel body to determine types of food resources the pots contained. In order to be certain that sites are comparable in age, potsherds will be dated using a thermoluminesence method.

This research will increase our understanding of prehistoric life in the upper Texas coastal plain, an area currently supporting a dense human population which continues to significantly modify the landscape. The results of this research will be shared with the public via presentations to amateur archaeologists and school groups (e.g., Harris County Archeological Society, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science). The mission of federal and state agencies responsible for managing archaeological collections and sites (e.g., United States Army Corps of Engineers, State of Texas) will also be enhanced by information from this research about the ways prehistoric inhabitants of this region used the land and the artifacts that these agencies protect and curate. This research will not only contribute to the graduate training of the co-PI (Hood), but also to undergraduate and K-12 learning at the University of Washington, particularly in helping both college and middle school students better understand hypothesis testing, as well as to hone their laboratory analysis and scientific writing skills.

ABSTRACT
ARC 0612988

This project employs archaeological and paleoenvironmental data to assess the effects of late Holocene climate change on resource availability, and will test the effects of this availability on prehistoric fisheries. Recent research by Dr. Bruce Finney (Finney et al. 2002) shows that salmon abundance in the northeastern Pacific Ocean has fluctuated dramatically over the last 2200 years due to climate change, and the research proposed here will assess the effects of these fluctuations on human foraging strategies. Within the context of foraging theory, this project will test whether people altered their foraging strategies to accommodate climate change and resource fluctuation by moving their fisheries from the riverine to the marine environment. To test this hypothesis, several lines of evidence from Kodiak Island, Alaska will be utilized: a) stable oxygen isotopes extracted from fish otoliths will be used to reconstruct the paleoenvironment; b) archaeological faunal materials will be analyzed to test for changes in foraging focus; and c) salmon abundance data from the last 2200 years will be used as a control for the paleoenvironmental and archaeological data.

The significance of this project lies in its unique archaeological perspective, and the potential of archaeological data to contribute to an understanding of the larger, long-term processes affecting the marine environment, fish ecology, human-environmental interaction and climate change, and Native Alaskan fisheries.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This research examines the history of emergent complexity in Northwest Alaska over the past 2000 years through a focused study of archaeological pottery from the coast of Kotzebue Sound and the adjacent river corridors into the Alaskan interior. Northwest Alaska witnessed significant social change over the past two millennia with the development of organized whale hunting, aggregated coastal villages, wealthy burials, and warfare. On both sides of the Bering Strait ethnic groups formed strong regional identities during this period that led to marked differences in material culture styles from sub-region to sub-region and eventually the expansion of Thule whale hunters eastward across the Canadian arctic. The relationships, interaction, and evolution of these ethnic populations remain among the most unresolved issues in the archaeology of this region. This research attempts to shed light on these issues and their implications for changing social and political organization in Northwest Alaska through the study of the pottery used by these groups. Pottery composition, manufacture techniques, and stylistic variability from archaeological assemblages around Kotzebue Sound will allow the student P.I. to evaluate several predictions about social development between the first and second millennia A.D. These predictions include the expectation for increased population density, territoriality, and social asymmetry at the corporate group level (within and between settlements) with implications for the production and distribution of pottery from clay source to production, use and discard.

Archived and newly acquired pottery collections from Cape Krusenstern, the northern coast of the Seward Peninsula including Cape Espenberg, the shores of Kotzebue Sound, and the Noatak and Kobuk River valleys will be studied to determine chemical composition of clays used in constructing the pots, the nature of pot manufacture (form, wall thickness, tempering, firing regime, etc), and variability in stylistic characteristics (of both decorated and non-decorated pottery). These characteristics will be studied to determine the degree of inter-regional pottery movement and inter- and intra-settlement differences in access to diverse sources, technologies, and/or styles of pots An important component of this research includes the collection of clay samples from geological sources around Kotzebue Sound and the Kobuk and Noatak Rivers for comparison to archaeological pottery samples. This will allow an estimation of the degree of pottery movement from source to deposition locales and a proxy for social interaction and movement. Another component of this research will be precision mapping and dating of archaeological features around this region in order to develop estimates of changes in regional population densities and distributions. Expanded radiocarbon and thermoluminescence chronologies will be built to refine and supplement existing chronological models for the region.

This work is conducted in partnership and under permit with the National Park Service. Project results will be shared with Native Alaskans and other local groups in the Northwest Alaska community through public and school presentations, primarily in Kotzebue, Alaska. In addition, large laminated posters and a self-timed PowerPoint presentation describing this research will be created and distributed to communities across the region. These educational products are easily distributed to remote communities and schools and are more effective and cost-efficient than trying to present in person in every village community in the region. Project results will be disseminated more widely through presentation at professional conferences, the creation of a project website, and public and school presentations in the Seattle area. University of Washington undergraduate students will participate in the project, assisting in sample preparation while taking an independent lab course for credit, supervised by the Co-PI.

This Research Coordination Network grant brings together and international, multi-disciplinary team of scientists and educators to better mobilize cases of long term human ecodynamics on the century to millennial scale to aid national and global efforts to develop effective future sustainable development and to create resources for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This RCN project will develop a collaborative research network that will identify conditions that allow people to develop sustainable relationships with the environment over the millennial scale or have led to unsustainable outcomes. This proposal draws upon widespread recognition that inter-generational sustainability education efforts and formulation of long-term environmental policy for adaptive management are ill served by short observational spans, restricted case pools, and disciplinary stove-piping. This RCN will promote development of a transdisciplinary millennial scale perspective for a genuinely sustainable future through three interlinked working teams; 1) building capacity in long-term sustainability investigations through systematic inter-regional comparison of cases representing long-term human ecodynamics ?experiments? of coupled natural and human systems impacted by climate change, multi-generational human impact, and inter-regional connection; 2) building cyberinfrastructure support through common data management, digital dissemination and visualization tools that both aid sustainability researchers and connect with sustainability educators; 3) Enhancing local and national initiatives in sustainability education and community involvement in global change science by innovative application of digital technology and creating direct links with education professionals and involving active local community participation in sustainability science & education.

This project will provide funding to the University of Washington to hold a three-day workshop that will bring together a diverse group of expert scholars and students to explore long-term human-environmental dynamics through the Holocene in the North Pacific with a focus on the Kuril and Aleutian islands. The reason for focusing on these island regions is that these archipelagos constitute model ecosystems for tracking migration, human-environmental interactions and adaptations. Over the past decade, in both areas of the North Pacific, interdisciplinary teams of archaeologists, biologists, geologists, chemists, and modelers have worked to better understand environmental and human dynamics. These teams have developed innovative methods for exploring the intersection of geological, paleoenvironmental, biological, and cultural histories of these island environments. However, as the PI states, substantial research questions, methodologies, and data sets for both regions remain disparate and nonintegrated and are subsequently underutilized. The purpose of this workshop is to bring these diverse groups of scholars and their students together to compare data, methods, and analyses in order to start a synthesis of the North Pacific human-environmental ecodynamics.

The workshop will be hosted by the University of Washington in early November, 2012 and will attended by approximately 35 participants, including scholars from the Unitied States, Canada, Russia, and Japan. In addition, the organizers envision a robust role for students; the proposal includes funds for up 10 students (graduate/undergraduate) to participate in the workshop from around the U.S. In return for travel, boarding and per diem, the students will be expected to play active roles in the management and intellectual activities of the workshop. A dedicated component of the workshop will be periodic student discussant presentations, in which students will be encouraged to reflect on the proceedings. Finally, careful planning and follow-up with the broader team of synthesis leaders will ensure the prompt preparation and publication of workshop results, preparation of the workshop report and white paper.

This project will support the Thesis research of CoPI Gjesfjeld, which is a systematic examination of ceramic use and social organization in the Kuril Islands. The CoPI proposes to utilize a quantitative network modeling approach to understand social organization via material remains, specifically ceramic sherds. Network models will be created based on geochemical sourcing of the ceramics and these models will potentially provide insights into social movement of ceramics in the prehistoric past. The CoPI has completed significant preliminary work on the ceramic sourcing and has obtained agreements from the Russian and Japanese institutions to analyze the materials. This project will contribute to a broader understanding of early social organization in the North Pacific and specifically in island environments.

Research on the population growth dynamics of past hunter-gatherers has focused mainly on the influence of food availability and scarcity on hunter-gatherer health, fertility, and mortality. Over the last two decades, however, demographic research among contemporary hunter-gatherers has revealed that infectious diseases also influence their health and population growth.

This project explores the possibility that the ancestral Alutiit inhabiting the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska were vulnerable to fish-borne and other gastrointestinal parasites as a result of their heavy reliance on marine and freshwater fish as well as their food preparation and community sanitation practices. As the dietary importance of marine vs. freshwater fish changed over time, and as food preparation and sanitation practices likewise changed, the Alutiit would have been exposed to different parasitic diseases, entailing changes in health and population growth. To evaluate these claims, the co-PI will recover and quantify changes in the relative frequencies of parasite remains preserved in Kodiak archaeological deposits, then compare these results against previous research on changes in Alutiiq food-ways, settlement practices, and population growth records.

This project will add to our growing knowledge about hunter-gatherer disease experiences by exploring behavioral and ecological influences on disease and its impact on population growth rates. The project will also illustrate the potential of parasitological analysis to uncover long-term changes in the prevalence of infectious diseases when pursued systematically. Because the lifecycles of these parasites involve many host species beside their human final hosts, this project will also shed further light on the ecology and biogeography of these parasite taxa and their nonhuman hosts.

Returning to traditional foods is a major component of many indigenous efforts to revitalize ancestral culture across the northeastern Pacific Rim, including among contemporary Kodiak Alutiit. While the health benefits of this revitalization are proving effective in counteracting degenerative disease epidemics such as diabetes among these communities, traditional foods also pose their own health risks that must be understood so that these can be avoided. This project will provide valuable knowledge about the health importance of fish and food preparation practices in the contemporary Alutiiq diet.

This award will support the travel and lodging of participants in the Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS) working group to attend the Ecosystem Studies of Subarctic Seas (ESSAS) Annual Science Meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 7-10, 2014. This working group will present research syntheses related to the paleoclimateology, paleoceanography, paleoecology, archaeology, and history of the subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic. This group will then meet for two days at the end of the conference to work out the logistics, themes, and intellectual responsibilities for preparing a collaborative synthesis volume on the Paleoecology of the Subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic Seas by 2017. Funds are requested to support the international travel and per diem of 13 participants, including five students.

Little is known about the sensitivity of marine mammal species and their human predators to environmental changes. Iñupiaq people of the northwest Alaskan coast today rely on marine mammal hunting for a large portion of their subsistence as they have for millennia, but it is uncertain how observed and expected changes in the marine ecosystem might affect future food security. Archaeology is uniquely situated to provide perspective on this problem because it can consider human activity over long periods of time, and investigate how past changes affected marine mammals and their human hunters. This research will examine if and how environmental variability in the Arctic over the past 2,000 years affected marine mammals that in turn influenced human hunting patterns. This project will compare evidence for changes in marine conditions and their timing to variation in human diet based on the remains of animal bones from archaeological sites. This research will also contribute long-term baseline data enabling broader understanding of marine ecological dynamics in the Arctic. Results of the study will be incorporated into National Park Service public media and curriculum that is shared with northwest Alaska schools.

Hunter-gatherers generally focus on capturing resources that provide the highest energy return compared to energy expended. The diet of northwest Alaskan peoples has varied over the past two millennia, but it is unclear if these shifts are in any way linked to the health of marine mammals, on which contemporary communities rely. It is expected that variations in marine mammal health, brought about by changes in the marine environment, should drive these shifts. To evaluate this claim, the co-PI will identify and tally animal remains to asses changes in human diet over the study period. The marine environment will be reconstructed by measuring isotopes of carbon and nitrogen present in archaeological marine mammal bones throughout the same period. The analysis is complemented by an existing radiocarbon chronology that will be augmented where needed to ensure tight control over the ages of analyzed samples. By comparing the timing of changes in human dietary preference to changes in the marine environment, this study will assess the influence of marine health on the diets of coastal Alaskans. Results of this research will provide time-depth and broader context to studies of current environmental changes and their impact on communities reliant on marine mammal hunting.

This project aims to better understand the forces guiding long-term histories of human-marine animal interactions and the extent to which marine populations were resilient to human hunting pressure prior to industrialization. Taking a historical ecological approach to investigate the complex, intertwined cultural and ecological histories of the Japanese sea lion (Zalophus japonicus) throughout the late Holocene up to the extinction of this species in the mid-20th century, this study will explore the resilience of a now-extinct marine mammal species to climate change, human harvesting, and habitat disruption, as well as the reciprocal implications of this, i.e. how humans were impacted by these variations in marine productivity and prey populations. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance public understanding of science and the scientific method broadly disseminating its findings. Results of this research will be shared in both public and academic venues and help promote the importance of ongoing marine mammal conservation efforts.

This research uses archaeological, genetic, and isotopic data to examine how maritime hunter-gatherers and marine mammals were entangled in complex ecological relationships preceding the extinction of the Japanese sea lion. Ancient DNA from 120 samples over 12 archaeological sites is being sequenced to track changing sea lion populations through the late Holocene. The PIs are also conducting stable isotope analysis on the same sea lion samples to gain insight into changing marine ecosystems as they may have affected sea lions and people. The study improves the understanding of the human role in ecological change, and vice versa, providing comparative data for studies of human-marine ecology and maritime archaeology and history.

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.