Doctoral Dissertation Research: Body Size and Shape Variation in Modern and Late Pleistocene-Holocene Gazelles: A 3D Approach

The goal of this doctoral dissertation research project is to develop a new 3D analytical approach to untangle the impact of environmental and anthropogenic factors on past human and animal populations, ultimately offering insight into the transition of humans from foragers to farmers. By providing new 3D quantitative techniques that enable animal bones to be utilized as proxies of past anthropogenic and environmental impacts, this project contributes to important discussions about the conditions surrounding this transition. These data provide the background conditions under which human sedentism and agriculture arose, allowing these events to be investigated on a local scale while simultaneously contributing to knowledge of how the earth’s major systems changed through time. Importantly, this research highlights the essential role of archaeology in recognizing the long-term impacts of humans on the environment, and how archaeological data can help guide policy and conservation efforts by informing on the ongoing interactions between humans, climate change and biotic communities. In collaboration with an international team this research will develop new quantitative algorithms for 3D shape analysis including two new complete model analysis (CMA) procedures to position (orient in 3D space) and segment 3D bone models for quantitative analysis. These procedures will be applied to 3D bone models from modern skeletal material from mountain gazelles of known age, sex and geographic location to identify areas of bone surfaces that provide good markers of sex, precipitation, temperature and locomotion. These algorithms will be applied to 14 animal bone assemblages from archaeological sites spanning the foraging-farming transition to better understand the intensity and nature of human-environment interactions during this pivotal time in human prehistory. This study will contribute both by developing new algorithms to analyze 3D bone models, and by providing the necessary tools to interpret animal morphological data. Furthermore, the CMA algorithms generated by this project will have applicability to a wide set of research questions and can be adapted by other disciplines. 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.