Herbert D. G. Maschner

Grand challenges for archaeology

Abstract This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS): Approach, Challenges, and Strategies

William J. McConnell, James D. A. Millington, Nicholas J. Reo, Marina Alberti, Heidi Asbjornsen, Lawrence A. Baker, Nicholas Brozov, Laurie E. Drinkwater, Scott A. Drzyzga, Jose, Fragoso, Daniel S. Holland, Claire A. Jantz, Timothy Kohler, Herbert D. G. Maschner, Michael Monticino, Guillermo Podesta, Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr., Charles L. Redman, David Sailor, Gerald Urquhart, and Jianguo Liu. (2011). Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS): Approach, Challenges, and Strategies. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America April: 218-228.

Changes in northeast Pacific marine ecosystems over the last 4500 years: evidence from stable isotope analysis of bone collagen from archeological middens

Changes in food web dynamics and ocean productivity over the past 4500 years are investigated using stable isotope analysis of nitrogen and carbon in collagen from animal bones preserved in coastal archeological middens on Sanak Island, along the eastern edge of the Aleutian archipelgo. Samples included Steller sea lions, Harbor seals, Northern fur seals, sea otters, Pacific cod and sockeye salmon. Sea otters had the highest δ13C (−11.9 ± 0.7‰) and lowest δ15N values (14.5 ± 1.4‰), Northern fur seals had the lowest δ13C values (−13.6 ± 1.4‰), and Steller sea lions had the highest δ15N values (18.4 ± 1.4‰) of the marine mammals. Cod isotope values were consistent with those of demersal organisms from near shore habitats (−12.5 ± 0.9‰ δ13C, 16.1 ± 1.4‰ δ15N), while salmon values were consistent with those of organisms existing in an open ocean habitat and at a lower trophic level (−15.2 ± 1.4‰ δ13C, 11.5 ± 1.7‰ δ15N). When comparing six different prehistoric time periods, two time periods had significantly different δ 13C for salmon. Otters had significantly different δ15N values in two out of the six prehistoric time periods but no differences in δ13C. The mean δ13C, corrected for the oceanic Suess Effect, of modern specimens of all species (except Northern fur seals) were significantly lower than prehistoric animals. Several hypotheses are explored to explain these differences including a reduction in productivity during the twentieth century in this region of the Gulf of Alaska. If true, this suggests that North Pacific climate regimes experienced during the twentieth century may not be good analogs of North Pacific marine ecosystems during the late Holocene.

An Introduction to the Biocomplexity of Sanak Island, Western Gulf of Alaska

Abstract: The Sanak Biocomplexity Project is a transdisciplinary research effort focused on a small island archipelago 50 km south of the Alaska Peninsula in the western Gulf of Alaska. This team of archaeologists, terrestrial ecologists, social anthropologists, intertidal ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, paleoecologists, and modelers is seeking to understanding the role of the ancient, historic, and modern Aleut in the structure and functioning of local and regional ecosystems. Using techniques ranging from systematic surveys to stable isotope chemistry, long-term shifts in social dynamics and ecosystem structure are present in the context of changing climatic regimes and human impacts. This paper presents a summary of a range of our preliminary findings.

Stylistic change as a self-organized critical phenomenon: An archaeological study in complexity

Archaeologists can learn from models of evolution as a self-organized critical phenomenon. Self-organized critical systems are large, interactive systems that organize into a critical state where minor events can trigger chain reactions. Such systems demonstrate power-law distributions in the size of changes, or “avalanches,” that occur. The theory of self-organized criticality is important in that it implies that the evolution of complex systems may be driven more by interactions between agents than by external events or natural selection. Stylistic changes may be examples of avalanches of interconnected events. Evidence for self-organized criticality is shown for stylistic evolution in historical pottery styles from New York State and is used to evaluate the nature of a prehistoric pottery typology from the Southwest.

Coastal Paleogeography and Human Occupation of the Western Alaska Peninsula

Geological and archaeological investigations on the western Alaska Peninsula establish relationships between postglacial sea level changes and regional settlement patterns, which are linked to the spatial and temporal distribution of marine and estuarine resources. Isostatic emergence dominated relative sea-level changes since deglaciation, but erosional landforms and gaps in the archaeological record suggest that site preservation has varied because of the interplay of eustatic sea level rise, isostatic uplift, and tectonic deformation. Coastal subsidence associated with a major earthquake about 2200 yr B.P. is linked with a 300-year hiatus in the regional archaeological record. A shift from estuarine to littoral and offshore resources following this period demonstrates the impact of such dynamic sea level fluctuations on the shape and biological productivity of the coastal zone. However, changes in village organization, house form, and subsistence base that define several archaeological phases arise from both environmental and sociopolitical instability. Models of culture change should accommodate local and regional geological boundary conditions in the North Pacific and similarly dynamic settings.

The roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food webs

There is a nearly 10,000-year history of human presence in the western Gulf of Alaska, but little understanding of how human foragers integrated into and impacted ecosystems through their roles as hunter-gatherers. We present two highly resolved intertidal and nearshore food webs for the Sanak Archipelago in the eastern Aleutian Islands and use them to compare trophic roles of prehistoric humans to other species. We find that the native Aleut people played distinctive roles as super-generalist and highly-omnivorous consumers closely connected to other species. Although the human population was positioned to have strong effects, arrival and presence of Aleut people in the Sanak Archipelago does not appear associated with long-term extinctions. We simulated food web dynamics to explore to what degree introducing a species with trophic roles like those of an Aleut forager, and allowing for variable strong feeding to reflect use of hunting technology, is likely to trigger extinctions. Potential extinctions decreased when an invading omnivorous super-generalist consumer focused strong feeding on decreasing fractions of its possible resources. This study presents the first assessment of the structural roles of humans as consumers within complex ecological networks, and potential impacts of those roles and feeding behavior on associated extinctions.

The bow and arrow in northern North America.

There were at least four waves of bow and arrow use in northern North America. These occurred at 12000, 4500, 2400, and after about 1300 years ago. But to understand the role of the bow and arrow in the north, one must begin in the eighteenth century, when the Russians first arrived in the Aleutian Islands. At that time, the Aleut were using both the atlatl and dart and the bow and arrow (Fig. ). This is significant for two particular and important reasons. First, there are few historic cases in which both technologies were used concurrently; second, the bow and arrow in the Aleutian Islands were used almost exclusively in warfare. The atlatl was a critical technology because the bow and arrow are useless for hunting sea mammals. One cannot launch an arrow from a kayak because it is too unstable and requires that both hands remain on a paddle. To use an atlatl, it is necessary only to stabilize the kayak with a paddle on one side and launch the atlatl dart with the opposite hand. The Aleut on the Alaska Peninsula did indeed use the bow and arrow to hunt caribou there. However, in the 1,400 km of the Aleutian Islands, there are no terrestrial mammals except humans and the bow was reserved almost exclusively for conflicts among them. The most significant event in the history of the bow and arrow is not its early introduction, but rather the Asian War Complex 1300 years ago, when the recurve and backed bows first entered the region, altering regional and hemispheric political dynamics forever.

Virtualization and the democratization of science: 3D technologies revolutionize museum research and access

Accessing data often presents aggregating problems to researchers in nearly every academic, research, and general scientific field of study. These are acute for natural history and archaeological collections, and the lack of access has been a contributing factor in problems of data comparability and an increasing reliance on the conclusions drawn in resulting publications. The creation of virtual repositories housed in a comprehensive, hyper-plastic data-base system, serving as virtual representations of a museums collections is critical to the future of modern analysis and the generation of science. Using 3D technologies, emerging image-based database architectures, online measurement and analysis tools, and related methods of virtualization enhance science by bringing collections to any scientist, student, educator, or layperson, anywhere in the world. With strong support from the National Science Foundation and private industry, the Idaho Museum of Natural Historys Idaho Virtualization Laboratory and the Informatics Research Institute are at the forefront of implementing 3D technologies to bring scientific analysis to a global audience. This is not a plan or theoretical discussion - it is a full-fledged global implementation. To date, we have scanned over 10,000 objects in 3D and created a global resource for analysis of natural history collections. This paper will describe our underlying assumptions and methodologies, the rationalization for such an approach, our capture techniques, image processing, and delivery structures, and highlight some of our key successes.

Traditions Past and Present: Allen McCartney and the Izembek Phase of the Western Alaska Peninsula

In 1971 Allen McCartney, together with Nancy McCartney and Michael Yarborough, conducted the first archaeological investigations on the lower Alaska Peninsula. The goal of their research was to investigate the boundary zone between the Aleut of the Aleutian Islands and western Peninsula, and the Yupik/Alutiiq peoples to the northeast. Excavating at three sites, McCartney and crew found the remains of villages dating to approximately A.D. 1000 that shared a particular type of projectile that became known as the Izembek Point, as well as a suite of more northern features such as polished slate, pottery, and a house with a stone foundation and a whale bone superstructure. McCartney defined the Izembek Phase based on these finds. Research conducted by Maschner over the last eleven years allows for an evaluation of the Izembek Phase and provides the necessary data to place McCartney’s initial important discoveries in a broader context. Based on new dates and fieldwork, the Izembek Phase as McCartney defined it is now quite different from its original formulation.