With primary support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Robert Blumenschine, Fidelis Masao, and Charles Peters will lead an international and multidisciplinary team to continue their long-term research on ancestral human (hominid) behavior at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge preserves among the world's richest records of the earliest, Oldowan, stone tool industry and abundant vertebrate fossils in geological deposits dated between 1.9 and 1.6 million years ago. The stone artifacts, and fossil bones bearing butchery marks made by the stone tools, provide evidence for the diet, foraging tactics and technological activities of hominids in the lake basin that occupied the Olduvai area during Oldowan times. These archaeological traces of hominid activity are distributed patchily within an area of ca. 400 km2, providing an unusual opportunity to understand the nature of hominid adaptations to different environmental conditions within the lake basin. When fully developed, this understanding will allow us to assess the ecological factors that initially selected for humankind's unusual dependence on technology and carnivory.
In order to accomplish this goal, we require a more detailed reconstruction of the landscapes occupied by Oldowan hominids in the prehistoric Olduvai lake basin. The reconstruction will be made by a team with individual expertise in geochronology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, palynology, plant phytoliths, marcro-plant fossils, stable isotopic geochemistry and small mammal taphonomy. Samples will be collected during two seven-week field seasons for analysis in specialized laboratories in the U.S., Europe, Tanzania, and South Africa. Landscape reconstructions will focus initially on the alluvial fan and lake margin settings of the eastern portion of the lake basin, in which we have already produced a large landscape archaeological sample and diverse paleoenvironmental indicators. These techniques of landscape reconstruction and additional archaeological excavations will be extended to the western portion of paleo-Olduvai Basin after we have established stratigraphic and age controls. Precise three-dimensional locational control of the archaeological and paleoenvironmental samples will be maintained using state-of-the-art mapping-level and survey-level global positioning system and optoelectronic total station equipment. Our work is designed to understand the ecological contrasts between the eastern and western portions of the basin in landscapes and hominid land use related to the repeated catastrophic volcanism that appears to have affected the eastern basin most severely, and in many cases exclusively.
A small but important portion of NSF support for the project will be used to help Tanzania continue to develop its facilities and scientific personnel for archaeological and paleontological research. Improvements will be made to the laboratory and permanent research camp at Olduvai Gorge in cooperation with the Tanzanian Antiquities Unit. The storage capacity for fossil and artifact remains in the laboratory established by the researchers in Arusha in cooperation with the Tanzania National Museums. Tanzanian students and field assistants will continue to receive training in field and laboratory techniques. These efforts are critical to the long-term research viability and conservation of Olduvai Gorge, for which Tanzanians require facilities and well-trained staff to lead archaeological research and to manage archaeological collections.
