Anthropology Commons^™

The Scale Of Pottery Manufacture During The Old Kingdom, Sarah L. Sterling

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The existence of specialized craftsmen — including stonemasons, coppersmiths, carpenters, jewelers and potters — in ancient Egypt arises in part from the general industries spawned from the elaborate monumental constructions that characterize the Old Kingdom (ca. 2600-2100 BCE). Pottery vessels in particular are one of the most abundant kinds of artifacts known from ancient Egypt, with functions ranging from formal presentation to baking bread, to grains and olive oil storage. While not all pottery is associated with monumental architecture, the emergence of specialized or semi-specialized potters is likely due to the same socioeconomic factors that gave rise to such famous …

Book Review Of, Plants Of Haida Gwaii, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviews the book "Plants of Haida Gwaii" by Nancy J. Turner.

Book Review Of, Women In Post-Independence Sri Lanka, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviews the book "Women in Post-Independence Sri Lanka," by Swarna Jayaweera

In The Wake Of The Gulf War: Assessing Family Spending Of Compensation Money In Sri Lanka, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$ 4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq’s military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines eleven case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these returnees are women from poor rural families who worked as domestic servants in Kuwait. The essay compares how the eleven households have spent compensation money and migrants’ remittances. Spending …

The Other Side Of The Tracks: The Archaeology And History Of A Virginia City, Nevada Neighborhood, Julie Marie Schablitsky

Dissertations and Theses

Archaeologists and historians have conducted a limited number of 19th century western neighborhood studies. The small number of inquiries into the urban past has left research on western working and middle class neighborhoods, along with their ethnic and class composition, relatively untouched by modern scholars. Although eastern immigrant neighborhood studies by historic archaeologists are currently increasing, western immigrant neighborhood research projects continue to be underrepresented in the literature. Perceiving an absence of western urban neighborhood studies, an intensive study on an ethnically heterogeneous working and middle class neighborhood was conducted in Virginia City, Nevada.

The community was situated adjacent to …

A Qualitative Analysis For Sex Determination In Humans Utilizing Posterior And Medial Aspects Of The Distal Humerus, Veronica L. Wanek

Dissertations and Theses

Visual and metric analysis both provide accepted methods for sex determination in humans. Visual ascertainment uses differing morphological traits in males and females to establish sex. Researchers have continually sought accurate methods of sexing long bones when skulls or pelves are absent or fragmented. These long bone elements may not have sexually distinct characteristics, but tend to survive in the field quite well.

Metric analysis depends on size dimorphism between males and females to correctly assign sex. Metric methods fail where the sexes overlap or when skeletal elements cannot be assigned to their correct biological population. Under these conditions, visual …

Patterns In Glass : The Interpretation Of European Glass Trade Beads From Two Protohistoric Sites In The Greater Lower Columbia Region, Gretchen Anne Kaehler

Dissertations and Theses

The issue of social status as it manifests in the archaeological record has long been a problematic one. Glass beads are often the most numerous class of historic artifacts recovered in protohistoric sites in the Pacific Northwest. Ethnohistoric accounts indicated that these beads might have functioned as prestige items and as a form of "primitive cash" among the aboriginal peoples of the Lower Columbia River in the early to mid 1800s. To what extent were glass beads indicative of status and can their spatial distribution within protohistoric sites be used to address this question?

The purpose of the present study …

Rethinking Precolonial Plant Cultivation On The Northwest Coast Of North America, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America are widely believed to have been true “hunter-fisher-gatherers,” lacking plant cultivation of any kind. This depiction of the region's indigenous inhabitants emerged within early colonial accounts and was perpetuated within the literatures of geography, anthropology, and archaeology. Still, there is ample evidence of plant cultivation available from archival, archaeological, and ethnographic sources. In particular, the peoples of coastal British Columbia created large gardens of edible estuarine plants, using sophisticated indigenous technologies. The oversight of these practices in written representations of the region reveals consistent patterns of bias, emanating from the …

Public Outreach And The "Hows" Of Archaeology : Archaeology As A Model For Education, Jon Darin Daehnke

Dissertations and Theses

There is growing awareness of the importance of public outreach in archaeology. Many professional archaeologists argue that in order to ensure continued funding we must communicate the relevance of our discipline to the public in a more effective manner. Furthermore, it is often argued that public outreach and education provides perhaps the only reliable defense against looting and rampant psuedoarchaeology.

Current outreach activities, however, tend to focus on what archaeologists have discovered about the past. While this type of outreach is important, a more effective model for public outreach would focus on the methods of archaeology, rather than the results. …

A Most Sacred Place: The Significance Of Crater Lake Among The Indians Of Southern Oregon, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discusses the Native American view of Crater Lake, Oregon, as a place of religious significance and the misunderstandings with whites as to its importance to Oregon's Indian tribes. Created some 6,500 years ago by volcanic eruption, Crater Lake has long been seen by Indians as a sacred place. Their hunting, berry gathering, and vision quests in the lake area were tied to their religious view of the lake. Since the 1850's, whites have treated the lake with a lack of understanding of its significance to the Klamath tribes. The National Park Service restricted hunting and charged Indians fees to pass …

Contested Lands, Contested Identities: Revisiting The Historical Geographies Of North America's Indigenous Peoples, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

In my work with the tribes and First Nations of western North America, I am told the same stories again and again. In intricate and sometimes gruesome detail, I am told how the white world, in its efforts to occupy and claim the western half of the continent over the last two centuries, employed myriad strategies—strategies of conquest—to separate indigenous peoples from their lands. And in these stories, tribal members, no matter their levels of education or backgrounds, recognize that the military conflicts, genocide, territorial dispossession and displacement, and enforced marginalization that has characterized Indian-white relations over this period cannot …

Traditional Land Use As Starting Point Opening Cross-Cultural Dialogue At Crater Lake And Lava Beds, Douglas Deur, Steven Mark

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Kennewick Man: Cultural Affiliation Report, Chapter 2: Review Of The Archaeological Data, Kenneth M. Ames

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Portland State University Professor Kenneth M. Ames was one of 18 distinguished scholars chosen to investigate and report on the cultural affiliation of the Kennewick human remains. This report reviews the extant archaeological record for the Southern Columbia Plateau.

Recent Geographical Research On Indians And Inuit In The United States And Canada, Robert Rundstrom, Douglas Deur, Kate Berry, Richard Winchell

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A geographical survey on Indians and Inuit in the United States and Canada..

Tribal Constructs And Kinship Realities : Individual And Family Organization On The Grand Ronde Reservation From 1856, Aeron Teverbaugh

Dissertations and Theses

This project examines marriage and residence patterns on the Grand Ronde Reservation between 1856 and the early 1900s. It demonstrates that indigenous cultural patterns continued despite a colonial imagination that refused to see them. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde continued to live in family groups much as they had in the pre-reservation era. They continued to exhibit patterns of marriage and kinship that were described in the ethnographies and by the earliest explorers in the Oregon area.

Strategies Of Indian Burning In The Willamette Valley, Robert T. Boyd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter, included in Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, published by the Oregon State University Press in 1999, explores fires set by the aboriginal inhabitants of the Willamette valley.

In 1971, geographer Carl Johannessen and colleagues at the University of Oregon published an article, "The Vegetation of the Willamette Valley," which proposed that, prior to European contact, the Willamette Valley, though surrounded by dense forests of Douglas-fir, was an open oak.savanna grassland. They also presented historical evidence to show that these prairie grasslands were maintained by annual fires set by the aboriginal inhabitants of the …

The Experimental Reduction Of Rock In A Camas Oven: Towards An Understanding Of The Behavioral Significance Of Fire-Cracked Rock, Douglas C. Wilson, David V. Delyria

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The selection and management of rock for roasting ovens, hearths, and sweat lodges were not trivial concerns for prehistoric households. The results of replicating a camas roasting oven are used to address the use-life and use-stages of fire-cracked rock. We concluded that the industry associated with the procurement and management of fire-cracked rock in the Pacific Northwest required significant quantities of labor and expertise to manage the raw materials and camas roasting byproducts. Recording the technological performance characteristics of fire-cracked rocks, including composition, size, and durability, is a necessary step to interpret and compare fire-cracked rock features at archaeological sites.

Archaeological Investigations At 45cl1 Cathlapotle (1991-1996) , Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge Clark County, Washington: A Preliminary Report, Kenneth M. Ames, Cameron M. Smith, William L. Cornett, Elizabeth A. Sobel, Stephen C. Hamilton, John Wolf, Doria Raetz, United States. Department Of The Interior, U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service, Region 1, Portland State University. Department Of Anthropology

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is the preliminary report, one in a series on the archaeology of the Wapato Valley region of the Lower Columbia River. Most of the reports discuss aspects of the excavations and archaeology of two sites, the Meier site (35CO5) and Cathlapotle site (45CL1). Other related topics are also treated.

Archaeological investigations at site 45CL1, Clark County, Washington, demonstrate that the locality is a very large (c 1.5ha), deeply stratified (2-4m) town site with an occupation spanning at least 1000 years (c. AD 1000 to 1840). Six large, complex depressions have been mapped. Test excavations show that these depressions represent …

Class Identity And The International Division Of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1996, 408,000 Sri Lankan women, nearly 10% of the country’s working-age women, worked abroad, many of them in the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf. In this paper I compare the influence of international migration on local hierarchies of class and gender in two villages in southern Sri Lanka: a Sinhala-speaking Buddhist village where I did my doctoral dissertation research in 1992-4, and a Tamil-speaking Muslim village where I spent some time during the summer of 1997. I discuss the challenges of using ‘class’ as a unit of analysis in a non-Western setting where gender identities, family ties, …

Bone Tool Technology : Measurements Of Curation And The Spatial Distribution Of Bone And Antler Artifacts From A Pacific Northwest Coast Plankhouse Site, Deborah Davis

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to develop a method of assessing and measuring the amount of curation behavior present in a bone and antler tool assemblage. Using lithic analysis as a guide, curation is defined by the amount of energy invested in the tool manufacturing process along with the overall complexity of each artifact. The Meier site (35C05), a Chinookan plankhouse site near Portland, Oregon was used to test the hypothesis that people will use an expedient (low energy investment) technology when there is an abundance of raw material available, low group mobility, and low material transportation constraints.

Since …

Enculturing Nature, William Lloyd Cornett

Dissertations and Theses

Human activity is embedded within a myriad of seldom-acknowledged ecological relationships. Anthropology and ecology, two holistic disciplines concerned with these activities, struggle with the topic of human/nature relationships because both are grounded within larger western discourses separating human behaviors from those of the natural world. This thesis examines the histories of anthropology and ecology in the 20th Century, and the effect these disciplines have had upon the formulation of contemporary urban worldviews that are based upon the separation of humans from nature.

Gender, Power And Identity In An African-American Church, Catherine Douillet

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines gender relations and gender symbolism in a small African-American Christian church in North East Portland. The study is based on ethnographic research in the church, from February 1995 to July 1995, and from February 1996 to June 1996, during which time I participated in Sunday services, religious activities outside of the service, and the social networks of some female church members. One section of this thesis describes my personal relationships to my fieldwork, not only to situate my position as a White female in an African-American church, but also to look at how my research questions relate …

Wearing A Dead Man's Jacket: State Symbols In Troubled Places, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A village rumor concerning the attempted theft of a uniform from the corpse of a Sri Lankan army soldier supplies the subject matter for this paper. In May 1993, soon after the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a spectacular local funeral for a Low Country Sinhalese soldier killed in the civil war near Trincomalee provided a space for the display of state symbols, the voicing of patriotic rhetoric, and the exhibition of the precision and discipline of the national army. Military pageantry legitimated the use of force by the government, while the funeral ritual as a whole produced a catharsis …

Jacob And Wilhelm Grimm's Fairy Tales And Children, Cornelia Marianne Seigneur

Dissertations and Theses

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm prided themselves on the notion that their collection of fairy tales, the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, was poetry from the Volk. Through their collection they sought to preserve the culture of a Germany disrupted by Napoleon.

Although the Grimm brothers did not originally set out to write children's literature, it became a natural progression for their fairy tales to be used for children.

The Grimms were certain that their fairy tales should be read to children. They saw the naturalness in their tales, thereby claiming that the Kinder-und Hausmärchen would be a good "Erziehungsbuch." As people …

Social Stratification Within A Protohistoric Plankhouse Of The Pacific Northwest Coast: Use-Wear And Spatial Distribution Analysis Of Chipped Lithic Artifacts, Cameron Mcpherson Smith

Dissertations and Theses

The spatial distribution of chipped lithic artifacts excavated at site 35C05, a Chinookan plankhouse of the protohistoric period, was observed to test the hypothesis that a gradient of material culture -- reflecting social status -- should be evident within the plankhouse, ranging from the highest to the lowest social rank. Prior to the spatial analysis, use-wear analysis was used to evaluate the classificatory labels used to describe the assemblage by a previous researcher. The use-wear analysis largely confirmed the functional classification of chipped lithic artifacts used by the previous researcher. The spatial analyses revealed that while most tool types were …

Wapato For The People : An Ecological Approach To Understanding The Native American Use Of Sagittaria Latifolia On The Lower Columbia River, Melissa Cole Darby

Dissertations and Theses

Sagittaria latifolia Willd. was an important root food and trade commodity for the Indians who lived along the Lower Columbia River in early historic times. This plant was prolific in the extensive wetlands of the Lower Columbia from about the great Cascades to the Kalama River. The tubers of this plant were called "wapato" in Chinook Jargon, the local trade language. The wetlands, and this plant that grew there, occupied a vast extent of the Lower Columbia territory; so much so that this valley was named 'Wapato Valley' by Lewis and Clark in 1805. This thesis will provide pertinent information …

Early Holocene Occupation At The West Lost River Site, Klamath County, Oregon, Douglas C. Wilson, John L. Fagan, Dorothy E. Freidel, Susan M. Colby

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excavations at the West Lost River Site (35KL972) provide new insights on early Holocene occupation of southwestern Oregon. The article focuses on the artifacts and specimens recovered from the site.

Clinging To Life: Varecia Variegata Rubra And The Masoala Coastal Forests, Natalie Vasey

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article describes the authors field study from October 1993 to February 1995 in Madagascar, surveying coastal and riverine forests, villages, and watersheds, studying the ecology and behavior of Varecia varuegata rubra, the red ruffed lemur, and Lemur fulvus albifrons, the white fronted lemur.

Sri Lanka's "Army Of Housemaids": Control Of Remittances And Gender Transformations, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

When the mass labor migration of women to the Middle East began in the early 1980's, many Sri Lankan social scientists predicted a revolution in gender equality and a greater participation by women in political and economic decision-making as a result of employment abroad. Noting that gender rarely correlates in predictable ways with social change, and questioning the dominant teleological ideology that change always happens for the better, this paper looks at relations between female migrants in a coastal village in the Southwest and the people responsible for spending and saving the money they remit to the village. Several case …

The Effect Of The Ideology Of Motherhood On Women, Shari A. Burke

Dissertations and Theses

The ideology of motherhood in the United States makes it seem as though motherhood is a natural role for women. The ideology holds mothers solely responsible for the well being of their children. Combined with the ideology of blaming the victim, the ideology of motherhood causes a great deal of guilt in women as mothers cannot possibly live up to the unrealistic expectations set up in the culture.

In this study, I have used two case studies to illustrate the impact of the ideology of motherhood on the lives of these particular women. Utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault and …