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Anthropology underwater: Investigating hunter-gatherer responses to Holocene water levels through archaeology, indigenous partnerships and virtual reality

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Abstract

Hunting and gathering is the longest human adaptation ever to exist. Foraging peoples moved over the planet, encountered every type of habitat, engaged with their environments in flexible and innovative ways, and were witnesses to vast climatic changes. One of the most notable planetary shifts since the Pleistocene is fluctuation in global water levels and its impact on the landscapes it exposed and submerged. This dynamic would have significantly impacted foraging communities across the globe, but neither water fluctuations nor human responses to them were uniform. Rates of water oscillations were variable, including long-term, slow changes, catastrophic events and others that were likely observable on a generational basis. Human adaptations to shifting water levels likely included mobility and changes in subsistence, among others. Further responses, such as the creation and sharing of traditional ecological knowledge about water level events, were likely codified in cultural practices that are not easily discernible in the archaeological record. To address these issues, this paper presents a case study of submerged archaeological sites in the North American Great Lakes, evidence of a hunter-gatherer occupation on a now submerged landscape. Nine-thousand-year-old stone-built hunting sites represent a specific subsistence strategy used during a time of lower water levels, and an archaeologically visible example of traditional ecological knowledge. This project brings together archaeology and virtual reality with indigenous partners and other knowledge holders to explore forager responses to Holocene water levels.

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The procedural content of a virtual reality system is a key contributor to its success. However, it is often the case that the content needs to be adjusted. This may take place for a variety of reasons. This research investigates the possibility of the use of machine learning technology to facilitate the modification of a games content. Here, the Deep Dive system was designed originally to predict ancient site locations. Recently it was repurposed to be used as an educational tool to facilitate aspects of STEM education. This required the modification of the content to support this novel use. An evolutionary learning algorithm, Cultural Algorithm, is employed to facilitate the addition of the new content required for the educational application.KeywordsProcedural Content GenerationEvolutionary AlgorithmsCultural AlgorithmsVirtual RealityStem education
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The goal of the project described here was to extend the immersive experience of the user in the Virtual Land Bridge. Such extensions would facilitate the use of the software system to contribute to the development of individual student learning plans over several different age categories. The principal strategy was to modify the multi-agent planning system to allow for the generation of local tactical behavior of the agents in the virtual world. This resulted in the addition of a new layer to the MAS planning system, producing a hybrid system that utilized global knowledge monolithically in the Pathfinder portion and local tactical knowledge in the VR layer. The resultant hybrid system was designed to produce improved caribou agent decision making and movement that could scale up to support large herds on the order of a hundred thousand and more. This new system is shown to increase user immersion that can contribute to the development of student learning profiles.
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The DeepDive System is a tool built to assist with the testing of archaeological hypotheses, the visualization of complex data, and the archiving of archaeological and ethnographic data. As such, it allows modern day archaeologists to recreate aspects of ancient cultural behavior through digital time travel. This paper describes how a researcher can configure a version of an ancient Land Bridge landscape and present it to selected participants. Their behavior can then contribute to the development of a hypothetical ethnography. A program that is potentially able to connect the actions of an ancient culture with the ecosystem that it is embedded in. The results of preliminary application of this system with hunters from a similar sub-Arctic landscape is described.
Article
The climate of arid central Asia (ACA) is extremely dry and early human settlement in the region were dependent upon an unstable water supply. Thus, knowledge of the hydrological fluctuation history is essential for understanding the relationship between humans and the environment in the region. Here we present a record of Holocene lake hydrodynamic intensity based on the grain size of suspended lacustrine silt isolated from the sediments of Bosten Lake, which feeds a river flowing to the northeastern Tarim Basin. The results show that lake hydrodynamic intensity was very weak during the early Holocene (12.0–8.2 ka); and then increased with two distinct centennial-millennial-scale intervals of weak intensity occurring during 4.7–3.7 ka and 1.2–0.5 ka. Notably, increases in lake hydrodynamic intensity occurred 2.2 kyr prior to an increase in local precipitation. We speculate that this was a consequence of relatively high early summer temperatures during 8.2–6.0 ka that resulted in an increased water supply from melting snow and ice in mountainous areas of the catchment. Thus, we conclude that the changes of the Holocene hydrodynamic intensity of Bosten Lake were mainly controlled by temperature or precipitation in different periods. The variations in the hydrodynamic intensity of Bosten Lake also influenced water availability for the human population that occupied the downstream area of the northeastern Tarim Basin. A drastic decrease in hydrodynamic intensity of Bosten Lake occurred around 700 CE likely have caused the emigration of the inhabitants and cultural collapse of Loulan (404 BCE -722 CE).
Article
Built structures to aid hunting activities, such as drive lanes and hunting blinds, have been documented on every continent with the exception of Antarctica. This global phenomenon dates to at least 12,000 years ago and is found across time, space, environments, and cultures. While there is increasing study and documentation of such sites, they are prone to destruction and are not always recognized, resulting in a lack of large-scale comparative studies. However, this widespread pattern deserves greater attention as it can reveal unique facets of social and economic life, particularly in the context of hunter-gatherer societies. Such constructions are literal niche construction, created to increase the yield and predictability of wild animal resources. They represent an investment in the landscape, organization of communal labor, a detailed knowledge of animal behavior, all the while creating socioeconomic tensions concerning permanent facilities and who owns them and the resources they generate among otherwise egalitarian populations. This paper presents a global overview of such features, and the anthropological theory and archaeological method to systematically study such sites. This methodology will be applied to a brief case study, analyzing some of the oldest hunting architecture on the planet, those submerged beneath Lake Huron.
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In this paper, we document and examine the Land Bridge system, a program concerned with the extrapolation of multiple layers of information from a massive data collection with the aim of generating culturally driven artificially intelligent agents that can yield results, which can aid in the discovery efforts of real‐world archaeologists. Over 270 gigs of data were examined and transformed into a simulated landscape populated with agents that reacted to the simulated world and one another.
Article
Some of the most pivotal questions in human prehistory hinge on archaeological sites that are now under water. While the discovery of submerged sites presents numerous technological challenges, they offer unique potentials for investigating time periods, cultures, and adaptations that are only poorly known on land. Yet despite this potential, the results from underwater research have, to date, had relatively limited impact. One reason is that underwater research rarely produces the systematic coverage of space and material culture that is needed to conduct anthropologically relevant research. The investigation of micro-regions as a means to elucidate economic and social relations in the past has been widely adopted in terrestrial archaeology, and yet is arguably even better suited to submerged settings. By defining specific and comparable localities as the target for intensive search, a micro-regional approach can provide the framework for generating a rigorous systematic coverage of space and material, while still operating within the physical and financial constraints of underwater research. This paper illustrates how a micro-regional approach to submerged landscapes can be operationalized as represented by survey efforts on the Late Paleoindian occupation of the Alpena-Amberley Ridge beneath modern Lake Huron.
Article
At the height of its extent, during strong glacials, the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP, south coast of South Africa) was the size of Ireland, sometimes doubling the size of the extant Cape Floristic Region (CFR). During strong interglacial climates, the PAP was mostly submerged and its ecosystems destroyed or restricted to small slivers. Scientists have largely ignored the PAP, presumably because it is submerged. We argue the PAP contributed to the diversification of the mega-diverse CFR biota and was the most productive foraging habitat available to the early modern humans that inhabited the famous archaeological sites along the current coast. We synthesize the palaeo-archival evidence and modeling results from this special issue, and other results, and propose a general model for the Last Glacial Maximum PAP, and offer suggestions as to conditions during marine isotope stages (MIS) 6 and 4. Unlike the region today, the PAP included abundant nutritious grassland, savanna-like floodplains, numerous wetlands, and a soft and highly dynamic coastline. Grasslands dominated the northern plains and fynbos shrublands the southern plains, both cut by broad meandering rivers with extensive floodplain woodlands and grasslands. The high productivity of the northern sector PAP supported a diverse plains fauna and rich habitats for humans living along its northern fringe, and during MIS 4 they had access to large ungulates on the grasslands, coastal resources, and plant foods from the plain and interior. The Holocene and historical contact period provide our current model of human and ecological conditions in the CFR region, but should be interpreted as a low-resource outlier.
Book
LEWIS R. BINFORD AND AMBER L. JOHNSON The organizers of this volume have brought together authors who have worked on local sequences, much as traditional archaeologists tended to do, however, with the modern goal of addressing evolutionary change in hunter-gatherer systems over long time spans. Given this ambitious goal they wisely chose to ask the authors to build their treatments around a focal question, the utility of the forager-eollector continuum (Binford 1980) for research on archaeological sequences. Needless to say, Binford was flat­ tered by their choice and understandably read the papers with a great deal of interest. When he was asked to write the foreword to this provoca­ tive book he expected to learn new things and in this he has not been disappointed. The common organizing questions addressed among the contributors to this volume are simply, how useful is the forager-eollector continuum for explanatory research on sequences, and what else might we need to know to explain evolutionary change in hunter-gatherer adaptations? Most sequences document systems change, in some sense. Though we don't necessarily know how much synchronous systemic variability there might have been relative to the documented sequence, most authors have tried to address the problem of within systems variability. In this sense, most are operating with sophistication not seen among traditional culture historians. The primary problem for archaeologists of the generation prior to Binford was how to date archaeological materials.
Article
It is widely accepted that caribou were an important resource for Paleoindian economies and lifeways in northeastern North America. The existence of large aggregation sites, such as Bull Brook, further suggests that hunters employed mass capture communal hunting methods for caribou exploitation during their seasonal migrations. As zooarchaeological remains are scarce in this region of acidic soils, site interpretations must often rely on historic or ethnographic analogs to determine the seasonality of these hunts, and on this basis, often predict that communal hunting of caribou took place in the fall. In contrast, new data from underwater sites in Lake Huron provide empirical archaeological evidence for communal hunting and social aggregation in the spring. It is suggested that this divergent pattern of seasonal exploitation is due to distinct paleoenvironment and larger populations of caribou at the end of the Pleistocene – resulting in unique hunting and social strategies seen only in the past.
Article
The current model for peopling of the Americas involves divergence from an ancestral Asian population followed by a period of population isolation and genetic diversification in Beringia, and finally, a rapid expansion into and throughout the Americas. Studies in the 1970s sought to characterize the biological relationships between different indigenous populations and first proposed an occupation of Beringia. More recent studies using molecular genetic markers often neglect to reference early works that laid the groundwork for current colonization models. We address this matter, and briefly summarize the literature and technological advances that contributed to our current understanding of the peopling of the Americas. Furthermore, we argue that describing the process of peopling of the Americas as "migrations from Asia" minimizes the significant genetic diversification that occurred outside of Asia, and offends indigenous Americans by discounting their origin narratives and land rights. Rather than referring to the indigenous peoples of the Americas as "migrants" or "immigrants," we recommend consistency in the language used to describe all post-glacial expansions of people into Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Article
Archaeologists have long been interested in the Lake Stanley lowstand event (∼10–8 ka) in the Lake Huron basin, as archaeological sites from the Late Paleoindian/Early Archaic cultural periods were inundated by subsequent high water levels. Recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental investigations of this submerged landscape have documented stone structures that were likely utilized for caribou hunting by these cultural groups during the late Lake Stanley lowstand phase of Lake Huron. In 2011 and 2012, a total of 67 core, sediment, and rock samples were collected in a 50 km2 area by divers and a ponar sampler deployed from a survey vessel. These samples were analyzed for sediment size, sorting, morphology and source, organic and carbonate content, testate amoebae, and organic materials. A series of indicators, including distinct microfossil assemblages (such as species only found in sphagnum moss and boggy arctic ponds), rooted trees (tamarack and spruce), and charcoal (ca. 8–9000 yr old) reveal a series of microenvironments that are consistent with a subarctic climate. The analysis of the Alpena-Amberley Ridge provides a detailed picture of the environment exploited by ancient peoples during the Lake Stanley lowstand period. The methodologies employed in this study can in turn help identify other unique microregions that may yield more archaeological sites with less obvious archaeological footprints.
Article
The Laurentian Great Lakes are a chain of five large water bodies and connecting rivers that constitute the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River. Collectively they form one of the largest reservoirs of surface freshwater on the planet with an aggregate volume of >22,000 km³Early interpretations of the postglacial lake history implicitly assumed that the Great Lakes always overflowed their outlets. A study of Lake Winnipeg which concluded that lack of water in a dry climate had dried that lake for millennia led to re-evaluation of the Great Lakes water-level history. Using the empirical information of glacioisostatic rebound derived from 14C-dated and uptilted Great Lake paleo-shorelines, a method of computation was developed to test the paradigm of continuous lake overflow. The method evaluated site and outlet uplift independently, and lowlevel indicators such as submerged tree stumps rooted beneath the present Great Lakes were found to be lower than the lowest possible corresponding basin outlet. Results confirmed the low-level, closed-basin hydrological status of the early Great Lakes. This status is consistent with paleoclimatic inferences of aridity during the early Holocene before establishment of the present patterns of atmospheric circulation which now bring adequate precipitation to maintain the overflowing lakes. In a sense, the early to middle Holocene phase of dry climate and low water levels is a natural experiment to illustrate the sensitivity of the Great Lakes to climate change in this era of global warming, should their climate shift to one much drier than present, or future major diversions of their waters be permitted.
Article
Like some other oral traditions of Australian Aborigines, those that relate to widespread and enduring coastal inundation appear to be several thousand years old. The best-documented traditions, some mythologised, are presented for six sites around the Australian coast (Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory; Rottnest, Carnac and Garden Islands, Western Australia; Spencer Gulf, South Australia; Kangaroo Island, South Australia; Port Phillip Bay, Victoria; Cairns and Fitzroy Island, Queensland). The minimum depths at which each tradition would have been true is determined from local bathymetry. These depths are then compared to postglacial sea-level history and minimum ages for each tradition calculated. These range from 7,500-13,400 years Before Present and represent unique observations of postglacial sea-level rise and its effects that have significant implications for an appreciation of the longevity of such traditions in preliterate societies.
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This chapter discusses the interaction between the Lake Baikal water level and tectonism in the surrounding area, specially the Prebaikalye area. More specifically, the changing drainage process of Lake Baikal from the Lena River system to the Angara River system is discussed. There is reliable evidence of water level lowering, such as topography showing many fjord-like features, but they cannot be assessed accurately. Rises in water level are assessed 120–150 m above the present level in the middle Pleistocene, about 200 ka. Uplifts in the western side of the Baikal depression began in the late Pliocene ca. 3 Ma and caused restructuring of the river network of Western Prebaikalye. Development of stream captures and young formation in late Pleistocene, extremely rugged relief of slope zones, developed against the background of relicts of an ancient smooth relief. The position of the modern and ancient Kultuk–Irkut runoff sills is such that lowering of its level by more than 2 m would have made Lake Baikal a drainless reservoir. Based on geologic–geomorphologic data, the modern Angara effluent is presumed to have formed ca. 50–60 ka. This is supported by molecular biology studies of gammarid populations.
Article
Analysis of calcined bone from the Udora site in south-central Ontario, Canada, indicates that the subsistence of Early Paleoindian (Gainey complex) peoples in the lower Great Lakes region included a mix of both large and small mammals: caribou, hare, and arctic fox. The presence of arctic fox and other paleoecological data indicate that the Paleoindian occupation at Udora occurred in a spruce parkland environment between 10,000 and 10,500 years ago, the minimum age of that habitat, or earlier. Evidence that Paleoindian peoples in northeastern North America also hunted caribou suggests that the concept of a "northern" adaptive zone in the greater Northeast (including the Great Lakes region) has some validity; however, the presence of both parkland and forested environments in this zone and presumed caribou behavioral responses to those environments indicate that Paleoindian adaptations to caribou may have been quite variable.