Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Medical Mobility And Intersectionality Across The United States-Mexico Border [La Movilidad Médica Y La Interseccionalidad En La Frontera Entre Estados Unidos Y México], Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The objective of this article is to analyze how intersectional processes shape differing degrees of medical mobility (defined as facility of movement across national borders for the purposes of obtaining health care services or pharmaceuticals) across the U.S.-Mexico border for Spanish-speaking Hispanics and English-speaking Whites. Furthermore, this document explores how intersectional factors such as race, language, socioeconomic status, and citizenship shape medical mobility patterns. The research used ethnographic methods (in-depth interviews and participant observation) over a period of sixteen months (from May 2017 until September 2018) in Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The results of the …

Medical Migration As Access To Health Care In The Rio Grande Valley, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This qualitative research explains difficulties among migrants when accessing health care. Many individuals of Mexican origin either travel to more accessible health care in Mexico or arrange to have medical services and pharmaceuticals transported to them in the United States. The research is based in a majority Hispanic and Spanish-speaking county in the US which is characterized by a high degree of poverty and illness, especially diabetes (Melo 2017, Montoya 2011). This article provides an ethnographic approach to medical migration and describes the importance of medical migration for both Mexico and the United States. The article offers recommendations for public …

Human Settlement And Mid-Late Holocene Coastal Environmental Change At Cape Krusenstern, Northwest Alaska, Shelby Anderson, James Jordon, Adam Freeburg

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Archaeologists hypothesize that mid-late Holocene environmental variability played a role in several significant western Arctic cultural developments including population fluctuations, the evolution of Arctic maritime adaptations, and Arctic-wide migrations. Further evaluation of these hypotheses requires higher resolution archaeological and paleoecological datasets than are currently available. In response, we undertook an interdisciplinary study at Cape Krusenstern, a large coastal site complex in northwest Alaska, which was occupied over the last ca. 5000–6000 years. Our goals were to refine local cultural and paleoenvironmental chronologies and to explore the question of how local environmental change may have influenced local settlement history. The resulting …

Effects Of Cultivation On Tuber And Starch Granule Morphometrics Of Solanum Jamesii And Implications For Interpretation Of The Archaeological Record, Nicole M. Herzog, Lisbeth A. Louderback, Bruce M. Pavlik

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Plant species native to the American southwest may have been cultivated by indigenous people, but techniques to assess the extent, timing, and impacts of early manipulation are lacking. Herein we apply morphometric techniques to tubers and starch granules of the Four Corners potato, (Solanum jamesii Torrey) to determine if cultivation, even over a relatively short period of time, can be detected. When compared to wild source plants, cultivated plants produced significantly larger tubers and starch granules. We suggest that, in concert with other archaeological and/or ecological data, microbotanical data may aid in identifying modifications to plant food resources related …

The Cavalry Of Christ: The Catholic Church And South Texas (1821-1882), Francisco Ortiz Jr.

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article reflects on the cavalry of Christ, Catholic Church and South Texas from 1821-1882. It mentions that Mexican Catholics upheld certain religious traditions such as family altars within the home in the light of the shortage of priests and places of worship. It also mentions about a petition that was presented to U.S. Bishops by a group of Catholics in 1837 and requested English speaking priests and help in confronting anti-Catholic sentiment that had become much more prominent.

Peyote Veneration In Challenging Times: Issues Of Land And Access In South Texas, Servando Z. Hinojosa

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Members of the Native American Church in the United States need reliable supplies of peyote, an entheogenic plant that they can today only obtain from licensed peyote dealers in South Texas. These dealers have supplied church members with their sacrament since the early twentieth century. Their predecessors, meanwhile, harvested peyote for Native Americans since before the mid-nineteenth century. In recent decades, though, issues of land access and plant scarcity have made it more difficult to acquire peyote. Better handling of peyote habitat and better harvesting methods are needed to meet increasing demand for peyote.

The Mountain Of A Thousand Holes: Shipwreck Traditions And Treasure Hunting On Oregon's North Coast, Cameron La Follette, Dennis Griffin, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

“Euro-Americans in coastal communities conflated and amplified Native American oral traditions of shipwrecks in Tillamook County, increasingly focusing on buried treasure,” write authors Cameron La Follette, Dennis Griffin and Douglas Deur. In this article, the authors trace the Euro-American blending of Native oral tradition with romances and adventure tales that helped create the “legends contributing to Neahkahnie [Mountain]'s reputation as Oregon's treasure-seeking haven.” They also examine the history of treasure-seeking in the area and describe the escalating conflict between Oregon's treasure-hunting statute and cultural resources protection laws, which led finally to statutory repeal that ended all treasure-hunting on state lands. …

The Galleon's Final Journey: Accounts Of Ship, Crew, And Passengers In The Colonial Archives, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Esther González

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Through archival research, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur document the history of the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship thought to be the Beeswax Wreck of Oregon — and its crew and passengers. The Santo Cristo “drew together a multiethnic crew of Spanish, Spanish Basque, Philippine, Mexican, and possibly African men in the most sprawling global trade network of their day.” Research conducted in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila and the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico in Mexico City shows that the galleon left the …

Views Across The Pacific: The Galleon Trade And Its Traces In Oregon, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

From 1565 to 1815, Manila galleons such as the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship now thought to be the seventeenth century “Beeswax Wreck” that sank or ran aground near Nehalem Spit in Oregon — followed a 12,000-mile route from the Philippines through the stormy North Pacific, sometimes passing parallel to what is now the north Oregon coast, before reaching their destination in Acapulco, Mexico. The galleons were a central part of Spain's complex international commerce system, transporting people and Asian goods around the world. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur discuss the Spanish empire and …

Oregon's Manila Galleon, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, Scott S. Williams

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

For two centuries, physical evidence of a vast shipwreck, including beeswax and Chinese porcelain, has washed ashore in the Nehalem Spit area on the north coast of Oregon. The story of the wreck has been “shrouded by time, speculation, and surprisingly rich and often contradictory Euro-American folklore.” In this introduction to the Oregon Historical Quarterly's special issue, “Oregon's Manila Galleon,” authors Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Dennis Griffin, and Scott S. Williams summarize the rich archival findings and archaeological evidence that points to the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Manila galleon owned by the kingdom of Spain and bringing …

The Galleon Cargo: Accounts In The Colonial Archives, Cameron La Follette, Douglas Deur, Esther González

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Much of the debris that has washed up on the shores of the northern Oregon coast for centuries were mainstays of Spanish trade carried as cargo across the world on Manila galleons. Both Native people and Euro-Americans have recovered large beeswax chunks, lending to the lore of the “Beeswax Wreck,” as well as Chinese blue-and-white porcelain fragments. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur describe research findings about cargo on the Santo Cristo de Burgos and similar Manila galleons, including the San Francisco Xavier of 1705, the previous favored candidate for the Oregon wreck. La Follette and Deur …

Greater Wealth Inequality, Less Polygyny: Rethinking The Polygyny Threshold Model, John Ziker

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea—based on the polygyny threshold model—that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human …

Assessing The Early Holocene Environment Of Northwestern Guyana: An Isotopic Analysis Of Human And Faunal Remains, Louisa Daggers, Mark G. Plew, Alex Edwards, Samantha Evans, Robin B. Trayler

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study used stable carbon δ¹³C and oxygen δ¹⁸O isotope compositions data to assess the extent to which diet breadths of northwestern Guyana changed during the Holocene. We analyzed human bone and enamel remains from seven shell mound sites dating between 7500 and 2600 BP. Our analyses demonstrate some degree of constancy in the availability of C₃ plants during the past several thousand years—though we note an increasing reliance on such plants beginning in the Early Holocene. We also document warming intervals during the Early Holocene (Early Archaic), which appear to correlate with dry periods …

Absence Of Evidence Or Evidence Of Absence? A Discussion On Paleoepidemiology Of Neoplasms With Contributions From Two Portuguese Human Skeletal Reference Collections (19th–20th Century), Carina Marques, Vítor Matos, Tiago Costa, Albert Zink, Eugénia Cunha

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Biological, sociocultural, demographic and environmental factors are major contributors to the contemporary burden of oncological diseases. Although cancer’s current epidemiological landscape is fairly well known, its past occurrence and history seem more obscure. In order to test the hypothesis that paleopathological diagnosis is an adequate measure of the prevalence of malignant neoplasms in human remains, 131 skeletons (78 females, 53 males, age-at-death range: 15–93 years) from Coimbra and Lisbon Identified Skeletal Collections, 19th/20th century (Portugal), were examined. The cause of death for all of the selected skeletons was a malignant neoplasm, as recorded in the collection’s documental files. Through the …

Absence Of Evidence Or Evidence Of Absence? A Discussion On Paleoepidemiology Of Neoplasms With Contributions From Two Portuguese Human Skeletal Reference Collections (19th–20th Century), Carina Marques, Vítor Matos, Tiago Costa, Albert Zink, Eugénia Cunha

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Biological, sociocultural, demographic and environmental factors are major contributors to the contemporary burden of oncological diseases. Although cancer’s current epidemiological landscape is fairly well known, its past occurrence and history seem more obscure. In order to test the hypothesis that paleopathological diagnosis is an adequate measure of the prevalence of malignant neoplasms in human remains, 131 skeletons (78 females, 53 males, age-at-death range: 15–93 years) from Coimbra and Lisbon Identified Skeletal Collections, 19th/20th century (Portugal), were examined. The cause of death for all of the selected skeletons was a malignant neoplasm, as recorded in the collection’s documental files. Through the …

Book Review Of, The Evolution Of Human Cooperation: Ritual And Social Complexity In Stateless Societies, Kenneth Ames

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviewed: The Evolution of Human Cooperation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies . CHARLES STANISH , 2017. Cambridge University Press , Cambridge . xiii + 336 pp. $110.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-107-18055-0. In this significant book, Stanish builds a model of how complex stateless societies solve collective action problems to benefit their members in the absence of coercive leadership--not in the absence of leadership but in the absence of coercive leadership. The model is framed by game theory, which is recast as anthropological game theory, and collective action theory, making the claim that humans are conditional cooperators. Crucial to successful …

How Natural Birth Became Inaccessible To The Poor, Rosalynn A. Vega

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

While Mexico’s upper class is discovering the wonders of natural birth, traditional Indigenous midwives are being actively discouraged from providing the same services to the lower classes.

Variation In Wealth And Educational Drivers Of Fertility Decline Across 45 Countries, Heidi Colleran, Kristin Snopkowski

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Fertility decline in human populations is an inherent evolutionary puzzle with major demographic, socio-cultural and evolutionary consequences. The individual level predictors of fertility decline are numerous, but the way these effects vary by country and how they are causally mediated by other factors has received relatively little attention. Here we take a multilevel approach to compare similarities and differences in the primary predictors of contemporary fertility declines—wealth and education—across 45 countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data collected from 2003 to 2015. We use multilevel models …

Investigación Arqueológica: Sitio Buen Suceso, Comuna Dos Mangas, Provincia De Santa Elena. Informe Preliminar., Sarah M. Rowe, Guy S. Duke

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Preliminary report on the 2017 excavation season at Bun Suceso, a Valdivia site located on the coast of Ecuador. Report submitted to the Region 5 Office of the Instituto Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural, Guayaquil, Ecuador.

An Efficient And Reliable Dna-Based Sex Identification Method For Archaeological Pacific Salmonid (Oncorhynchus Spp.) Remains, Thomas C.A. Royle, Dionne Sakhrani, Camilla F. Speller, Virginia L. Butler, Robert H. Devlin, Aubrey Cannon, Dongya Y. Yang

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Pacific salmonid (Oncorhynchus spp.) remains are routinely recovered from archaeological sites in northwestern North America but typically lack sexually dimorphic features, precluding the sex identification of these remains through morphological approaches. Consequently, little is known about the deep history of the sex-selective salmonid fishing strategies practiced by some of the region's Indigenous peoples. Here, we present a DNA-based method for the sex identification of archaeological Pacific salmonid remains that integrates two PCR assays that each co-amplify fragments of the sexually dimorphic on the Y chromosome (sdY) gene and an internal positive control (Clock1a or D-loop). The first assay coamplifies a …

Naming Brazil's Previously Poor: “New Middle Class” As An Economic, Political, And Experiential Category, Charles H. Klein, Sean T. Mitchell, Benjamin Junge

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The early years of the 21st century were historic for socioeconomic relations in Brazil. While long known for stark socioeconomic inequality, the nation became internationally celebrated for its economic growth and successful poverty-reduction initiatives, which together propelled some 35 million “previously poor” Brazilians into what became called a “new middle class.” The apparent rise of this “new” class has generated contentious debates and a range of social science studies in Brazil; yet this literature is little known in the Anglophone academic world. While some have interpreted this demographic transformation as an expansion of the existing middle class, others have questioned …

Respect The Land - It’S Like Part Of Us: A Traditional Use Study Of Inland Dena’Ina Ties To The Chulitna River & Sixmile Lake Basins, Lake Clark National Park And Preserve, Douglas Deur, Karen Evanoff, Jamie Hebert

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

For countless generations, Lake Clark has been home to the inland Dena’ina people. This unique and vast fresh-water lake complex sits at the intersection of sprawling tundra, taiga, and jagged cordillera, dotted with villages. Here, village life has been sustained by herds of caribou, shorelines populated by moose and beaver, vast runs of salmon ascending from Bristol Bay, and other natural assets. But the area’s uniqueness extends beyond its abundant natural resources. Also unique is the National Park Service (NPS) unit that has occupied the region known as Lake Clark National Park and Preserve (LACL) in recent decades.

The study …

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Evolutionary Models Of Culture Change, Cameron M. Smith, Liane Gabora, William Gardner-O’Kearney

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. Several decades of important foundation-laying work took a social Darwinist approach and exhibited ecologically-deterministic elements. This is not the case for more recent developments to the evolutionary study of culture, which emphasize non-Darwinian processes such as self-organization, potentiality, and epigenetic change.

Book Review Of, Figures In Buddhist Modernity In Asia, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a book review of, Figures in Buddhist Modernity in Asia. Jeffrey Samuels, Justin Thomas McDaniel, and Mark Michael Rowe, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. ISBN 9780824858544

Indigenous Siberian Food Sharing Networks: Social Innovation In A Transforming Economy, John P. Ziker, Karen S. Fulk

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. A social food-sharing network within the Ust’-Avam community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia is analyzed for underlying patterns of resilience and key evolutionarily stable strategies supporting cooperative behavior. Factors influencing the network include interhousehold relatedness, reciprocal sharing, and interaction effects. Social association also influences sharing. Evidence for multiple determinants of food sharing in this sample is discussed in reference to major evolutionary hypotheses and comparable studies. In sum, the findings illustrate the robustness of self-organizing …

La Memoria Contra La Jerarquía: Excavaciones En Buen Suceso, Sarah M. Rowe

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Two Cognitive Transitions Underlying The Capacity For Cultural Evolution, Liane Gabora, Cameron M. Smith

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper proposes that the distinctively human capacity for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended cultural evolution came about through two temporally-distinct cognitive transitions. First, the origin of Homo-specific culture over two MYA was made possible by the onset of a finer-grained associative memory that allowed episodes to be encoded in greater detail. This in turn meant more overlap amongst the distributed representations of these episodes, such that they could more readily evoke one another through self-triggered recall (STR). STR enabled representational redescription, the chaining of thoughts and actions, and the capacity for a stream of thought. Second, fully cognitive modernity following the …