Modeling Hunter-Gatherer Settlement and Subsistence Patterns: Prehistoric Chumash Land-Use at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

摘要

The archaeological record along the central coast of California has revealed that prehistoric Chumash groups developed a variety of coastal and terrestrial economic adaptations that influenced their subsistence and land-use practices. However, the role of these adaptations during various stages of cultural change is less clear. Using ideas from Central Place Foraging Theory, models of site location strategies are developed to address how changes in Chumash settlement and subsistence practices may reflect optimal adjustments to fluctuations in demography and/or environment through time. Paleoclimatic data was used to develop a model of marine and terrestrial habitat productivity from the Early Holocene through the Late Period. This model was then applied to an analysis of archaeological sites from the Vandenberg Air Force Base (AFB) radiocarbon database that combines archaeological data from past studies and site location information from the Vandenberg AFB Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database. It is hypothesized that through time, long and short-term changes in the spatial organization of hunter-gatherer settlements at Vandenberg AFB were not only the result of terrestrial and coastal environmental adaptations, but also a result of significant demographic changes in the region.