Adam Brown's poster proposal

Man Kind is unique in our capacity for cumulative cultural evolution. This has allowed us to adapt to wider range of habitats than any other species, and since cultural evolution is not confined to the mechanisms of genetic evolution, the development and differentiation of variants can progress much more rapidly. However, an individual cultural variant is not equally adapted to all environments. (Richardson and Boyd 2005) The computer program titled GARP (which can be downloaded from the site www.nhm.ku.edu/desktopgarp/) is designed to compare known occurrences of a species and a variety of ecological data sources to identify characteristics of the ecological niche it is occupying and map all occurrences of that niche across a defined portion of the landscape. This technique can be used with cultural variants as well as non-human species, and has been used to compare the ranges of Paleolithic European societies, with results that are in good agreement with the archaeological record. (Banks et. al. 2008) I will attempt to use this technique to map the ecological niche of some people group from SE Asia and then attempt to evaluate and explain any inconsistencies, should they occur, between the available niche area and the region of that niche which is actually occupied.

Data found thus far:

· Digital Terrain Elevation Data sets are available from the geo community website for the Mekong countries

· climate data set covering all of indo-china (http://cru.csi.cgiar.org/continent_selection.asp). It is in an ascii-grid, coma delineated format and contains about 100 years of observation in a variety of fields.

· Grasslands data from (http://archive.wri.org/pubs/datasets.cfm?SortBy=1)

· It looks like there are forest type files available from (http://gislab.cifor.cgiar.org/fsic/goHome.do), but I cant figure out how register. When I figure this out, I will have the necessary environmental data.

· Point locations of cultures: Dr. McClatchey has agreed to allow me to work with the locations of the villages with which he is working in Thailand, representing a group of people which has moved between regions a generation ago. This would allow me to determine if their present and past locations fall within the same ecological niche. I would also like to open this up to the class, I know that some are (or will soon be) actively researching in the Mekong region. I would welcome point data from other cultures, and then could provide the GARP output to those who contributed data in order to advance their research.

Once all of the data is in hand, I will obtain vector outlines of the countries for which there is point data, clip the raster grids to these boundaries, and then use arcview to generate new files sumarising the relevant environmental and ecological factors. I would prefer to use geotiff output, but need to do some more reading on GARP and determine which raster formats it prefers. The point data does not need to be transformed in any way before running the simulations.

Sample GARP output from Banks et. al. (2008):

Fig. 4. GARP prediction based on both Solutrean and Epigravettian sites dated to 21

1 kyr cal BP. Grid squares with 1e5 of 10 models predicting the presence of

an eco-cultural niche are indicated in grey, grid squares with 6

e9 models in agreement are depicted in pink, and squares with all 10 models in agreement are

indicated in red. Archaeological site locations (i.e. GARP occurrence points) are indicated by yellow circles.

Sources:

Banks, William E., dErrico, Francesco, Pererson, A. Townsend, Vanhaeren, Marian, Kageyama, Masa, Sepulchre, Pierre, Ramstein, Gilles, Jost, Anne,Lunt, Daniel (2008) Human ecological niches and ranges during the LGM in Europe derived from an application of eco-cultural niche modeling. Journal of Archaeological Science. 35: 481-491

Richardson, Peter J., Boyd, Robert (2005) Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.