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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Reconstructing Landscape Use Patterns Using Strontium Isotope Ratios, Marian I. Hamilton May 2018

Reconstructing Landscape Use Patterns Using Strontium Isotope Ratios, Marian I. Hamilton

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation uses modern habitats and fauna to model the variability and predictive power of strontium isotope ratios in identifying dispersal patterns in primates and habitat preference in primate and non-primate fauna. It concludes that there are significant isotopic differences between gallery forest and xeric grassland habitats in the same area and that these differences are reflected in fauna with habitat preferences for one or the other. It also identifies the most reliable methodological approaches for identifying the philopatric and dispersing sex in primate communities. Finally, it applies this methodological recommendation to strontium isotope data from South African hominins, concluding …


The Structural Violence Of Maya Sacrifice: A Case Study Of Ritualized Human Sacrifice At Midnight Terror Cave, Belize, C. L. Kieffer Nail Mar 2018

The Structural Violence Of Maya Sacrifice: A Case Study Of Ritualized Human Sacrifice At Midnight Terror Cave, Belize, C. L. Kieffer Nail

Anthropology ETDs

The site of Midnight Terror Cave is located in the karstic Roaring Creek Valley near the village of Springfield in the Cayo District of Belize. The site was discovered in 2006 and fieldwork was conducted by the Western Belize Regional Cave Survey Project and California State University, Los Angeles, between 2008 and 2010. This dissertation focuses on the osteological analysis of the bones of 118 individuals recovered and recorded at the site. The osteological, contextual, and demographic evidence is framed within ritual and costly signaling theory of structural violence and viewed with the ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature of the ancient …