Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings

Theses and Dissertations

The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project

contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture

in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols

found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted

as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines

this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and

comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore

database, …

Investigating The Functions Of Copper Material Culture From Four Oneota Sites In The Lake Koshkonong Locality Of Wisconsin, Jacqueline Marie Pozza

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Oneota use of native copper in the Lake Koshkonong locality between A.D. 1100 and 1400. Over 600 pieces of Oneota copper artifacts originating from four sites were documented and analyzed in order to investigate distribution, production, utilization, and the ideological and social significance behind this raw material. The artifacts analyzed for this study were recovered from Oneota sites adjacent to Lake Koshkonong in Jefferson County, Wisconsin: Crabapple Point (47JE93), Schmeling (47JE833), Koshkonong Creek Village (47JE379), and Crescent Bay Hunt Club (47JE904). These assemblages primarily included awls, beads, pendants, and fragmented material. The data set also includes unique …

Decolonizing African-American Museums: A Case Study On Two African-American Museums In The South, Anastacia Jonique Scott

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand how African-American museums’ exhibits help individuals gain their sense of racial identity through public memory. In an era where the United States is supposedly “post-racial” African-American museums are flourishing. As institutions serving an important role in preserving the collective memory of African-American people in the US, African-American museums evoke questions of representation within the larger US narrative that confirm the persistent saliency of race in society, and therefore continue to have a public function in maintaining and developing a racial African-American identity (Jackson 2012; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Wilson 2012; Golding 2009).

My research is …

Cultural Perceptions Of Chikungunya In The Dominican Republic, James Preston Kerns

Theses and Dissertations

Chikungunya (CHIKV) is a mosquito-borne virus that recently (2013) entered the Western hemisphere and tore through the Caribbean and most of Latin America. The symptoms include rash, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and fever. In many cases, sufferers report persistent arthralgia long after the actual viral infection has subsided. There are a variety of misperceptions about CHIKV, which directly impact public health efforts aimed at reducing the prevalence of the disease. Understanding the epidemic spread of CHIKV in the DR and the growth of misconceptions about the origin, severity, cause, and treatment of the disease requires a perspective that encompasses …

Sifting Through The Sand: Adaptive Flexibility In The Middle Archaic Occupations Of The Sandhills Province Of South Carolina, Audrey Rachel Dawson

Theses and Dissertations

Based on a sample of Coastal Plain Middle Archaic sites in addition to lithic debitage data from three Morrow Mountain (7,500-5,500 BP) occupation clusters at the Three Springs site (38RD837/841/842/844), Richland County, South Carolina, this dissertation explores the applicability of a model of Adaptive Flexibility to the Morrow Mountain occupations of the South Carolina Sandhills Province. The model of Adaptive Flexibility was developed to explain the redundant, low-density scatters of lithic debitage and generalized, expedient tools made of locally available raw materials that characterize the Middle Archaic, specifically Morrow Mountain, archaeological record of the South Carolina Piedmont. Multiple lines of …

A Study Of Material Diversity In The Carolina Colony: Silver Bluff, Yaughan, Curriboo, And Middleburg Plantations, Brandy Joy

Theses and Dissertations

The Carolina Backcountry is a temporally and geographically defined area reaching westward from the Carolina Lowcountry and its center, Charleston. For roughly a one hundred year span between the late seventeenth century and late eighteenth century it was a frontier and contact zone for colonists and indigenous groups. The Backcountry has sometimes been considered culturally and socially retarded, lacking the material refinement found in the colonial center of Lowcountry Charleston, South Carolina. Often landed estates in the eighteenth century Carolina Backcountry have been portrayed as one side of a dichotomy between refinement and local, rural folk craft traditions. I propose …

Enslaved Labor In The Gang And Task Systems: A Case Study In Comparative Bioarchaeology Of Commingled Remains, William D. Stevens

Theses and Dissertations

This study designs and tests an approach intended to confront one of the major problems faced within biological anthropology, the commingling or mixing of human skeletal remains. The first goal of the study is to implement an approach to sorting mixed human remains in order that they can be made amenable to comparative study. Bioarchaeologists depend on an array of measures, preserved in the human skeleton, to assess the lifestyles and identity of past human groups. As many of these measures are preserved within the morphology of different bones, it is imperative that the association and context of remains are …

The Unsung Evolutionist: Charles Rau's Swiss Lake Dwelling Collection At The Smithsonian Institution, Liam C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

During the second half of the nineteenth century, museums and collectors around the world engaged in a collecting frenzy focused on objects from the Swiss Alpine sites known as Pfahlbauten. Romantic reconstructions of these sites captured the antiquarian imagination and resulted in an artifact diaspora. Charles (Carl) Rau, a German-American archaeologist who became the first Curator of Antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), collected several hundred Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts from the lake dwelling sites of Robenhausen and Auvernier, donating this material as well as his library to the SI upon his death in 1886. This thesis investigates the …

Late Prehistoric Lithic Economies In The Prairie Peninsula: A Comparison Of Oneota And Langford In Southern Wisconsin And Northern Illinois, Stephen Wayne Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the environmental settlement patterns and the organization of lithic technology surrounding Upper Mississippian groups in Southeastern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. The sites investigated in this study are the Washington Irving (11K52) and Koshkonong Creek Village (47JE379) habitation sites, contemporaneous creekside Langford and Oneota sites located approximately 90 kilometers apart. A two-kilometer catchment of Washington Irving is compared to that of the Koshkonong Creek Village to clarify the nature of environmental variation in Langford and Oneota settlement patterns and increase our understanding of Upper Mississippian horticulturalist lifeways. Lithic tool and mass debitage analyses use an …

The Future Of Arabic Music: No Sound Without Silence, Nesma Magdy Khodier Vcuq

Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, Arabic music has been intrinsically linked to Arab culture and by extension bonded to the environmental landscape of the region, reflecting their emotions, moods, and behaviors. Numerous technological advancements in the latter half of the twentieth century, have greatly affected the rich legacy of Arabic music, significantly impacting the natural progression of traditional Arabic musical genres, scales, and instrumentation.

This thesis serves as an introduction to generative methods of music production, specifically music generated through gestures. Through generative music, and its unique ability to map gestures to different musical parameters, music can be produced using computer algorithms.

The …