Doctoral Dissertation Research Award: Recycling of Material Culture

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Human reuse of space and material culture is a widely documented behavior throughout history, but researchers are only beginning to understand how recycling influenced human behavioral evolution. Recycling can take place either within an individual lifetime or at much larger time scales. Archaeology is therefore well positioned to examine the effects of recycling because the material culture record results from multiple activities and occupations over extended periods of time. It has been shown that recycling repeatedly rewrites archaeological patterns through history, yet researchers have limited models for studying its effects on the archaeological record. This project will investigate early examples of recycling, specifically that of stone tools. Models of previously unexplored factors that impact the frequency of recycling in archaeological deposits, allowing archaeologists to better understand why this behavior happens in certain locations will be developed. These will be employed to evaluate the temporal and spatial distributions of occupations in artifact deposits exposed on open land surfaces. Such sites constitute a major untapped source of information about the prehistory in a region, which has been a nexus of human movement and interaction. This project will also promote open science through sharing of computer code and archaeological data to facilitate reproducibility and accessibility. Furthermore, this project will foster international collaboration to make the archaeology more accessible so it can be better incorporated into the story of human history. It is currently argued that stone tool recycling occurred because of limited access to raw material sources. However, there are ethnographic and archaeological examples of recycling occurring in places with locally available stone resources. This project tests an updated model of recycling that is patterned by exposure of artifacts, selection behaviors, and mobility patterns. The investigators create agent-based computer simulations to identify artifact distributions that result from this proposed model. These patterns will then be compared to archaeological data from a Paleolithic surface site complex. It will be determined if concentrations of recycled objects overlap with proxies for exposure, selection, and mobility as patterned in the simulation. The models developed will help archaeologists identify parameters that make recycling more or less likely within a landscape, allowing for better understanding the history of human land use. This project represents an important step to explore the range of conditions that may promote recycling of stone tools in order to fully understand how this behavior functioned in the past. 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.