Anthropology Commons^™

Using Archaeological Remote Sensing To Evaluate Land Use And Constructed Space In Chaco Canyon, Jennie O. Sturm

Anthropology ETDs

Archaeological remote sensing includes a suite of non-invasive methods that can be used to study elements of the archaeological record that may not be achievable otherwise. Using primarily geophysical remote sensing, and especially ground-penetrating radar (GPR), three studies involving questions of “use” were conducted in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The first used GPR to study the built interior features of a single room in Pueblo Bonito to evaluate use and function of that room. Three categories of features were identified in the GPR data and confirmed with subsequent excavation. The second study used GPR to re-evaluate an enigmatic land use …

Amaro E Piccante: The Production And Use Of Terroir In The Scandal Of Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oils, Daniel Gene Shattuck Ii

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation explores the revalorization of Italian extra virgin olive oils after a food scare that revealed some oils to be inauthentic or adulterated. In the process of distinguishing products, producers and tasters looked toward terroir or the “taste of place” as proof of their declarations of authenticity and as a method for differentiating oils. However, in this attempt, they engaged with other pervasive tropes of difference including those that intersected with belonging, the local and global, and race. This dissertation argues that terroir is a material-semiotic object; that while it may be grounded in the materiality of oils is …

Comparative Processes Of Sociopolitical Development In The Foothills Of The Southern Maya Mountains, Amy E. Thompson

Anthropology ETDs

Human behaviors and settlement decision-making can be evaluated through an assessment of settlement patterns. This dissertation examines the human behaviors that guide settlement selection, first through an analysis of settlement patterns to assess intra-site social communities, and second how communities develop over time. Three case studies examine settlement structure and what influences settlement selection within archaeological and modern contexts from the same region, southern Belize. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on two Classic period (250-800 CE) Maya centers, Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il, and more than 50 modern Maya villages. Extensive survey and excavations were conducted to compare the development of settlements …

Seventeenth-Century Spanish Colonial Identity In New Mexico: A Study Of Identity Practices Through Material Culture, Caroline M. Gabe

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation explores how seventeenth-century Spanish colonial households expressed their group identity at a regional level in New Mexico. Through the material remains of daily practice and repetitive actions, identity markers tied to adornment, technological traditions, and culinary practices are compared between 14 assemblages to test four identity models. Seventeenth-century colonists were eating a combination of Old World domesticates and wild game on colonoware and majolica serving vessels, cooking using Indigenous pottery, grinding with Puebloan style tools, and conducting household scale production and prospecting. While assemblages are consistent in basic composition, variations are present tied to socioeconomic status. This blending …

A Noncoherent Governance: Tinkering With Stones In The Old City Of Acre, Caitlin Davis

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation recounts a series of episodes in the architectural conservation of the Old City of Acre in Israel. It studies the stones and mortars, residents and inspectors, papers and computers involved in the conservation of historic buildings, highlighting the moments in which the technical details of architectural conservation entangle themselves with the administrative techniques of government authorities. I describe architectural conservation as a tentative process, one that requires the coordination of various actants into precarious associations. Here, description is important. The pages that follow experiment with an anthropological practice that writes against conclusion. This is an anthropology that refuses …

“We Practice Lakota Way, But We Are Not An Indian Church”: The Diverse Ways Lakota Christians Articulate, Perform And Translate Ethnicity In Congregational Life, Kristin A. Fitzgerald

Anthropology ETDs

This study looks at articulations, performances and translations of ethnicity among urban Lakota Christians at St. Matthew’s and St. Isaac Jogues in Rapid City, South Dakota. Within the context of increased ethnic revitalization and recognition, Native American Christians are negotiating new models of ethnicity in typically Western arenas, often manifesting through actions and discourse that are ostensibly traditional. Yet even in this era of recognition, the public performance of cultural authenticity is not the only thing on people’s minds. Native people mark various practices, symbols, and persons as traditional or modern at different points in history or within different contexts …

The History Of Admixture In African Americans, Jessica M. Gross

Anthropology ETDs

African American admixture has been a focal topic of genetic studies since the mid-20^thcentury. Generally, these studies estimate individual- and population-level African and European ancestry proportions. Some of these studies fit unrealistic admixture models to the patterns of genetic diversity in African Americans to determine both the onset time of admixture between Africans and Europeans, and the per-generation contribution of Europeans.

This research has failed to consider the contribution of the millions of Africans who migrated, either forcibly or by choice, to North America during and after slave importation, and failed to consider how changing social dynamics have …

Facial Fluctuating Asymmetry: Developmental Origins And Implications For Long-Term Health, Katelyn Marie Rusk Phd

Anthropology ETDs

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), characterized by random left-right deviations from perfect symmetry in anatomical structures, is a form of bilateral asymmetry that is thought to reflect underlying developmental instability (DI). DI refers to an organism’s relative ability to buffer against stochastic fluctuations in environmental conditions throughout development. FA is commonly used within evolutionary biology and anthropology as a cumulative indicator of chronic stress exposure during development and its consequences for long-term health. While the FA literature is extensive, there are two primary areas of inquiry that remain incomplete: assessing the full breadth of health correlates of FA across the human life …

Ethnic Identity And Genetic Ancestry In New Mexicans Of Spanish-Speaking Descent, Meghan Healy

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation focuses on a regional population, New Mexicans of Spanish-speaking descent (NMS), to explore the nature of identity-related substructure in admixed populations and its implications for research and policymaking. We looked at the relationship between ethnic/ethnoracial identity and genomic ancestry in NMS in two studies. In the first, we collected genomic ancestry data using 270 autosomal microsatellites in 98 New Mexicans who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino and provided more detailed information on their ethnoracial identities. We tested for genetic substructure in this sample along with 13 other admixed samples from the Americas. The New Mexican sample showed evidence …

Trends In Health, Stress, And Migration In The Pre-Contact Southwest United States, Alexis O'Donnell

Anthropology ETDs

The major goal of this dissertation was to examine migration and its impacts on health through use of dental morphological and paleopathological data. The case study is the Southwest United States between A.D. 1200-1400s. The second chapter, written with Corey Ragsdale, Biological Distance and the Fate of the Gallina in the American Southwest, examines where the Gallina people may have gone upon abandoning their homes in the late A.D. 1200s. We used dental data for 492 individuals and mean measure of divergence (biodistance) analysis to examine several hypotheses regarding where the Gallina went. We find that the Gallina may have …

Situating Giving Back For Native Americans Pursuing Careers In Stem: “You Don’T Just Take, You Give Something Back”, Janet Page-Reeves, Gabriel Leroy Cortez, Yoenesha Ortiz, Mark Moffett, Kathy Deerinwater, Douglas Medin

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

This article explores how a desire to give back influences Native Americans pursuing education and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We present analysis of data from 51 interviews with Native students and STEM professionals. Despite the compelling evidence of the core significance of a community orientation among Native Americans, insufficient attention has been given to thinking about the unique challenges faced by STEM professionals in devising ways to give back and how this relates to the continuing problem of under-representation of Native Americans in STEM. Here we propose strategies for universities and industry to honor Native ways …

Pottery And Practice In The Late To Terminal Classic Maya Lowands: Case Studies From Uxbenká And Baking Pot, Belize, Jillian Michelle Jordan

Anthropology ETDs

This study examines interaction networks among non-elite potters at Uxbenká and Baking Pot, Belize during the Late to Terminal Classic Period (AD 600-900). Approaches to non-elite communities often assume that spatially distinct architectural groups are synonymous with social groups. While residential proximity surely influences interaction, social relations extend beyond neighbors so equating proximity with interaction simplifies the complex everyday lives of the Maya. Framed within a communities of practice theoretical framework, the goals of this study are threefold: (1) to understand pottery production practice among non-elite potters, (2) to identify communities of practice and (3) to evaluate community interaction through …

A Biocultural Examination Of Health Risk Among New Mexicans Of Spanish-Speaking Descent, Carmen Mosley

Anthropology ETDs

Individuals of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish (HLS) origin suffer disproportionately from higher poverty rates, less education, less access to health care, and greater risk factors for and prevalence of chronic diseases compared to their White counterparts. How health disparities emerge over the life course remains unclear. Allostatic load (AL) provides an approach in health research that utilizes a life course perspective and multi-system view of cumulative physiological, or health risk. AL is used to identify sociodemographic and biological factors that contribute to racial differences in health risk. However, AL is not widely used to explore causes of poorer health outcomes …

Explaining Variation And Change Among Late Pleistocene And Early Holocene Microblade-Based Societies In Northeastern Asia, Meng Zhang

Anthropology ETDs

This project aims to provide a culture-ecological explanation of variation and change among microblade-based societies in Northeastern Asia during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene between c. 30,000 - 6,000 years ago. Assuming that paleoenvironmental changes stimulated cultural changes due to available food resources and that local environment conditioned cultural variation, the development of microblade-based societies can be divided into four phases (c.30-22 kya, 22-15 kya, 15-10 kya, 10-c.1 kya uncal. BP) in four regions (north continental, south continental, north insular, and south insular).

The study’s macroecological approach based on Constructing Frames of Reference (Binford 2001) is applied to elucidate …

Written And Oral Histories Of The Chicano Movement At New Mexico Highlands University, 1968-1970, Julianna C. Wiggins

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This thesis presents spoken, written, and drawn histories produced before the Chicano Movement at New Mexico Highlands University in November 1970 and the discourses which have followed in the movement’s wake fifty years later. This qualitative study explores the campus climate at NMHU using the student newspaper Highlands Candle. Its contents from 1968 until 1971 are contrasted with the multiple voices of a generation which adopted the term Chicano as a racial identifier into the NMHU vernacular. Social factors including the formation of student-of-color groups and the return of veterans from the Vietnam War appear to change the student …

Applying Anthropology, Assembling Indigenous Community: Anthropology And The Pascua Yaqui Tribe In Southern Arizona, Nicholas Barron

Anthropology ETDs

In the context of the US, anthropology and Indigenous politics are interconnected phenomena with points of intersection that are more often assumed then empirically explored. Using a historical anthropological approach, this study addresses this oversight through a focused analysis of the interconnected histories of anthropology and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Southern Arizona. Illustrated through four case studies of engagements between anthropologists and the Pascua Yaqui, I pose three interrelated arguments regarding the relationship between anthropology and Indigenous political formations. To being with, the dichotomous view of anthropology as friend or foe, dominator or liberator, to and of Native communities …

Out Of Africa: The Ecological Context And Constraints On Early Homo Migration, Kathryn Gwen Sokolowski

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Ecospaces Of The Iberian Peninsula At The Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition: A View From The Archaeofaunal Record [Dataset], Emily Lena Jones, Milena M. Carvalho

Anthropology Datasets

No abstract provided.

Women Hidden In In-Between Spaces: Using Brothels To Expand The Archaeology Of Gender, Addey Susanne Dominguez

2019 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Nidus Idearum. Scilogs, Vii: Superluminal Physics - Second Edition, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

My lab[oratory] is a virtual facility with non-controlled conditions in which I mostly perform scientific meditation and chats: a nest of ideas (nidus idearum, in Latin). I called the jottings herein scilogs (truncations of the words scientific, and gr. Λόγος – appealing rather to its original meanings "ground", "opinion", "expectation"), combining the welly of both science and informal (via internet) talks (in English, French, and Romanian). * In this seventh book of scilogs collected from my nest of ideas, one may find new and old questions and solutions, referring to different scientific topics – email messages to research colleagues, or …