Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

Algorithms And Automation: An Introduction, Ian Lowrie

University Honors College Faculty Publication and Presentations

Our world is densely populated by ubiquitous processors, capacious storage, and vigilant sensors. Networks of such machines are constantly measuring, packaging, storing, circulating, and operating on the world. They are busy assembling and being assembled, sharing information, and distributing their processing loads as they make decisions and enact plans. At the same time, they are refusing connections, maintaining their immune systems, performing network security, managing their boundaries, and controlling access. Human bodies move among this flexible, securitized meshwork of silicon, electricity, code, fiber optics, and data: building, maintaining, and restructuring. Their activity ensures that aesthetic, epistemological, economic, and political structures …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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.

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 …