Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reassessing The History Of The Poverty Point Phenomenon: A Case Study From The Jaketown Site, Mississippi, Usa, Seth Bradley Grooms

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Towards the end of the Late Archaic period (ca. 4800-3000 cal BP), between 3,600 and 3,300 years ago, Native Americans engineered a colossal earthwork complex that covers approximately 200 hectares in northeast Louisiana. Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site known as Poverty Point and the namesake for a material culture pattern documented to varying degrees at sites throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV). However, the nature of interactions between these sites and the type site is poorly understood. The people who constructed the Poverty Point site lived on wild food resources. They hunted, fished, and gathered food from …

Variability Among Later Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers, Mica Jones

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The hunting and gathering way of life is the most enduring and resilient in human history. However, the ways that a wild food-based subsistence system affects people’s social and economic organization are often oversimplified and variability is poorly understood. In general, there’s been a tendency, particularly among non-Anthropologists, to assume that hunter-gatherer societies are static and that historic groups represent an earlier, simpler way of life. This is particularly true in Africa, where small, highly mobile groups are common ethnographically. However, dramatic rainfall fluctuations over the last ~30,000 years significantly altered resources available to hunter-gatherers in diverse environments of northern …

Earthen Monuments And Social Movements In Eastern North America: Adena-Hopewell Enclosures On Kentucky’S Bluegrass Landscape, Edward Ross Henry

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geometric earthen enclosures are some of the best known pre-Columbian monuments in North America. Across the Eastern Woodlands, many have been preserved as state and national parks. However, their chronological placement is poorly understood as they relate to the rise of complex social behaviors associated with the Adena-Hopewell florescence (500 BC–AD 500) in the Middle Ohio Valley. This is especially true for communities who built smaller enclosures referred to by archaeologists as ‘scared circles’. To better understand the timing, tempo, and nature of their construction I examined the Bluegrass Region in Central Kentucky using aerial and terrestrial remote sensing methods …

The Solid & The Shifting: Darwinian Time, Evolutionary Form And The Greek Ideal 
In The Early Works Of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Monroe Kreutziger

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

“The Solid & the Shifting”: Evolutionary Form, Darwinian Time, and the Greek Ideal in the Early Works of Virginia Woolf

By

Joseph Kreutziger

Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature

Washington University in St. Louis, 2017

Professors Melanie Micir, Robert Milder, Steven Meyer, Vincent Sherry, Zoe Stamatopoulou

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“Now is life very solid or very shifting?” Virginia Woolf asks in her diary of 1931, a question she claims haunts her in its contradictions. This dynamism between the solid and the shifting aspects of life and temporality is fundamental to an analysis of Woolf’s writing process. …

The Technological And Socio-Economic Organization Of The Elmenteitan Early Herders In Southern Kenya (3000-1200 Bp), Steven Thomas Goldstein

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how the modern world has been shaped by the origins and spread of food production deeper in our past is an enduring and fundamental goal of anthropological archaeology. In Africa, mobile pastoralism emerged as a way of life that is economically and ideologically focused on herding livestock, and spread across the continent over the last 8000 years. Despite the potential importance of African pastoralism within global dialogues on the origins of food production, the social and economic systems that sustained its spread through the continent remain poorly understood. A culture-complex known as the Elmenteitan is associated with the spread …

Seeds As Artifacts Of Communities Of Practice: The Domestication Of Erect Knotweed In Eastern North America, Natalie Graham Mueller

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers, and in transforming ecosystems we also change the selective environment for the plants and animals that live among us. The bodies and behaviors of domesticated plants and animals are thus rich artifacts of traditional ecological knowledge and practice. I study the morphology and behavior of domesticated plants as a proxy for ancient agricultural communities of practice. The transition from food procurement to food production is one of the most significant shifts in human history. I consider this process as the evolution and spread of a knowledge system. Domestication studies are usually focused on differentiating …

An Epic Hydrography: Riverine Geography In The Argonautika Of Apollonios Rhodios, Joseph R. Morgan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The literary record of the Ancient Mediterranean contains untapped potential for the study of the history of spatial representation, a new frontier in the history of geography. The articulation of spatial networks in written form is an integral element of several genres represented in the extant corpus of Greek literature. An analysis of the fabula space of an ancient narrative—the internal geography of the work itself—provides insights into the generic constraints, intertextuality, and contemporaneous geographical concepts that authors drew upon in constructing their particular literary geographies. The Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios presents a particularly rich fabula space in epic form. …

The Science Of The Concrete: A 21st Century Bricoleur, Julie Weinberger

Graduate School of Art Theses

The 1962 work of structural anthropology The Savage Mind by Clause Levi- Strauss argues the position of the bricoleur, a resourceful artisan who relies

primarily on mystical thought and constructs using whatever materials are available. In this thesis I argue how my modes of making are parallel to those of the bricoleur, exploring the notion that science and mystical thought are equivalent approaches to understanding the world around us. By exploring aspects of nature, time and space, I invocate the ancient past through my references to indigenous cultures and insert my own experiences through the lens of my IPhone documented …

The Craft Of Fiction: Teaching Technique, 1850-1930, Mary Stewart Atwell

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The Craft of Fiction, 1850-1930

This dissertation considers two models of authorship active in the British nineteenth century: one that viewed the writing of fiction as the province of genius unconnected with the world of work, and another that saw it as a practice requiring a set of learned skills. This distinction carried implications of class, since writing that was understood to be work could be a product subject to marketplace exchange, and also gender, since the "hack-writing" so despised by mid-century periodical writers was often discursively feminized. Though the model that privileged genius and disregarded the labor involved in …

History Of Anthropology At Washington University, St. Louis, 1905-2012, David L. Browman

Books and Monographs

This is a history of the development of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis as researched and recorded by Professor David L. Browman. His research includes the development of anthropology as a department, profiles of faculty and other noteworthy individuals involved in anthropology at the university and in St. Louis, a list of department chairs and faculty affiliated with the department, and personal recollections.