Anthropology Commons^™

Marine Reservoir Effects In Seal (Phocidae) Bones In The Northern Bering And Chukchi Seas, Northwestern Alaska, Joshua Reuther, Scott Shirar, Owen Mason, Shelby L. Anderson, Joan B. Coltrain, Adam Freeburg, Peter Bowers, Claire Alix, Christyann M. Darwent, Lauren Y.E. Norman

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We explore marine reservoir effects (MREs) in seal bones from the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas regions. Ringed and bearded seals have served as dietary staples in human populations along the coasts of Arctic northeast Asia and North America for several millennia. Radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates on seal bones and terrestrial materials (caribou, plants seeds, wood, and wood charcoal) were compared from archaeological sites in the Bering Strait region of northwestern Alaska to assess MREs in these sea mammals over time. We also compared these results to ¹⁴C dates on modern seal specimens collected in AD 1932 and …

Owner Sex And Human–Canine Interactions At The Park, Shelly Volsche, Elizabeth Johnson, Bianca Reyes, Cecelia Rumsey, Kayla Murai, Deisy Landeros

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate if and what types of differences exist between men and women when interacting with their dogs in a “natural” setting. In the case of this study, we defined “natural” as visiting a public park with their dog. To do this, we completed a series of 10-minute focal follows (n = 177) on human–canine dyads at local leashed and off-leash dog parks from December 2018 to March 2019. Data collection included counting incidences of 14 specific interactions (i.e., “baby talks to dog” or “scolds/speaks harshly to dog”), observable demographics (sex of …

Anatomy Of Disaster Recoveries: Tangible And Intangible Short-Term Recovery Dynamics Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Chelsea E. Hunter, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet, Anudeep Dewan

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes and aftershocks had catastrophic impacts on rural households living in biophysical extremes. Recoveries from natural hazards that become disasters have tangible and intangible short- and long-term dynamics, which require linked quantitative and qualitative methods to understand. With these premises in mind, we randomly selected 400 households in two accessible and two inaccessible settlements across two of the highest impacted districts to assess variation in household and settlement recoveries through tangible impacts to infrastructure and livelihood and intangible impacts to place attachment and mental well-being. We conducted household surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups over two …

"Through A Forest Wilderness:” Native American Environmental Management At Yosemite And Contested Conservation Values In America’S National Parks, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chapter 9. The philosophies and views of nature prevalent in the 19th century West shaped the early National Park Service, and continue to influence park policy today. Park-builders incorrectly viewed early parks as untouched “wilderness,” even as Native peoples continued to occupy, revere, and actively manage lands and resources on these lands. This misapprehension fostered the creation and enforcement of park regulations meant to protect wild spaces, resulting in the displacement of both Native peoples and the culturally significant habitats that they had helped sustain for millennia. Among these regulations, federally imposed restrictions on burning and other traditional plant community …

Balance On Every Ledger: Kwakwaka’Wakw Resource Values And Traditional Ecological Management, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Chief Adam Dick

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter illustrates the core environmental values of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people on the Pacific coast of Canada to explore how they manifest in the traditional management of coastal natural resources. The authors’ survey of environmental values is based on the authentic knowledge of Chief Adam Dick, a co-author of the chapter. The chapter argues that talking about Indigenous Knowledge without the broader context of environmental values can lead to serious scholarly misunderstandings and insists that long-term collaborations between academic researchers and specialized knowledge holders from Indigenous communities is necessary in order to represent Indigenous Knowledge accurately.

This chapter illustrates …

Navigating Multidimensional Household Recoveries Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natural disaster recovery is multidimensional and takes time depending on vulnerabilities. Changeo ccurs as households embedded within integrated social and environmental systems adapt or transform.We focus on the April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes to understand rural natural disaster recovery. We conducted household surveys on critical earthquake impacts and recovery trajectories with 400 ran-domly selected households in four clusters of settlements in two districts with catastrophic impacts to all houses and infrastructure. To track rapid change in the short-term, we completed surveys at two intervals—approximately 9 months and 1.5 years. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination, our analysis explores relationships among critical …

Fire, Native Ecological Knowledge, And The Enduring Anthropogenic Landscapes Of Yosemite Valley, Douglas Deur, Rochelle Bloom

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Yosemite Valley is a place with rich and enduring traditions of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, manifesting in specific management practices that, in turn, leave discernible imprints upon the natural landscape. Historically, the Native American inhabitants of Yosemite Valley have employed a variety of techniques that materially enhance the availability of culturally preferred plant communities. This chapter identifies specific techniques that appear consistently in the oral traditions and written historical accounts of the valley. These methods included anthropogenic burning, pruning and coppicing, clearing underbrush beneath trees, hand eradication (“weeding”) of certain competing species, selective harvesting, smoking, “knocking” of dead wood from the …

"The People's Commune Is Good": Precarious Labor, Migrant Masculinity, And Post-Socialist Nostalgia In Contemporary China, Xia Zhang

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male …

Innovative Teaching Knowledge Stays With Users, Brittnee Earl, Karl Mertens, Susan E. Shadle, John P. Ziker

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, survey, and social network analyses revealing that faculty who use innovative teaching practices preferentially talk to each other, suggesting that greater steps are needed for information about innovative practices to reach faculty more broadly.

We Studied What Happens When Guys Add Their Cats To Their Dating App Profiles, Lori Kogan, Shelly Volsche

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

If you’ve used a dating app, you’ll know the importance of choosing good profile pics.

These photos don’t just relay attractiveness; a recent study suggested that 43% of people think they can get a sense of someone’s personality by their picture. You might guess that someone who has included a photo of themselves hiking is an outdoorsy type of person.

But as scientists who study human-animal interactions, we wanted to know what this meant for pet owners – in particular, male cat owners.

If you’re a guy who owns a cat, what kind of effect does it have on suitors …

Modeling Incipient Use Of Neolithic Cultigens By Taiwanese Foragers: Perspectives From Niche Variation Theory, The Prey Choice Model, And The Ideal Free Distribution, Pei-Lin Yu

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The earliest evidence for agriculture in Taiwan dates to about 6000 years BP and indicates that farmer-gardeners from Southeast China migrated across the Taiwan Strait. However, little is known about the adaptive interactions between Taiwanese foragers and Neolithic Chinese farmers during the transition. This paper considers theoretical expectations from human behavioral ecology based models and macroecological patterning from Binford’s hunter-gatherer database to scope the range of responses of native populations to invasive dispersal. Niche variation theory and invasion theory predict that the foraging niche breadths will narrow for native populations and morphologically similar dispersing populations. The encounter contingent prey choice …

Reframing Native Knowledge, Co-Managing Native Landscapes: Ethnographic Data And Tribal Engagement At Yosemite National Park, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Several Native American communities assert traditional ties to Yosemite Valley, and special connections to the exceptional landmarks and natural resources of Yosemite National Park. However, tribal claims relating to this highly visible park with its many competing constituencies—such as tribal assertions of traditional ties to particular landscapes or requests for access to certain plant gathering areas—often require supporting documentation from the written record. Addressing this need, academic researchers, the National Park Service and park-associated tribes collaborated in a multi-year effort to assemble a comprehensive ethnographic database containing most available written accounts of Native American land and resource use in Yosemite …

Benediction: The Teachings Of Chief Kwaxsistalla Adam Dick And The Atla’Gimma (“Spirits Of The Forest”) Dance, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, William White

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Like the symposium that inspired this book, its contents are preceded by the words of Chief Kwaxsistalla wath-thla Adam Dick. His name, Kwaxsistalla – bequeathed to him by his father and grandfather, who had inherited the name from generations going back to the beginning of remembered time – is a chiefly title that means “smoke from his fire reaches around the world.” He was chief of the Qawadiliqalla (Wolf) Clan of the Dzawada7enuxw (Tsawataineuk) Kwakwa’kawakw from Kingcome Village on the mainland coast of British Columbia.

Life-History Factors Influence Teenagers’ Suicidal Ideation: A Model Selection Analysis Of The Canadian National Longitudinal Survey Of Children And Youth, John P. Ziker, Kristin Snopkowski

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Suicidality is an important contributor to disease burden worldwide. We examine the developmental and environmental correlates of reported suicidal ideation at age 15 and develop a new evolutionary model of suicidality based on life history trade-offs and hypothesized accompanying modulations of cognition. Data were derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (Statistics Canada) which collected information on children’s social, emotional, and behavioral development in eight cycles between 1994 and 2009. We take a model selection approach to understand thoughts of suicide at age 15 (N ≈ 1,700). The most highly ranked models include social support, early …

The Life History Of Human Foraging: Cross-Cultural And Individual Variation, John Ziker

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters’ increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations. The data reveal an average age of peak productivity between 30 and 35 years of age, although high skill is maintained throughout much of adulthood. In addition, there is substantial …

How Taiwanese Death Rituals Have Adapted For Families Living In The Us, Pei-Lin Yu

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Taiwanese people living in the United States face a dilemma when loved ones die. Many families worry that they might not be able to carry out proper rituals in their new homeland.

As a biracial Taiwanese-American archaeologist living in Idaho and studying in Taiwan, I am discovering the many faces of Taiwan’s blended cultural heritage drawn from the mix of peoples that have inhabited the island over millennia.

Not The Cat’S Meow?: The Impact Of Posing With Cats On Female Perceptions Of Male Dateability, Lori Kogan, Shelly Volsche

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The aim of this study was to investigate whether men were considered more attractive when posing for a photo alone or holding a cat. Prior research suggests that women view pet owners as more attractive and dateable than non-pet owners; however, this effect was strongest with dog owners. We hypothesized that men posing with cats would be more attractive than those posing alone. Using an online survey, women viewed images of a man posing alone or with a cat and rated the men on the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Big Five Inventory. Women viewed men as less …

Migrant Emplacement: Gendered Subjects, State Regulations, And The Discursive Erasure Of Elders In Sri Lanka, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discriminatory assumptions about family structure and care work underlie a 2013 Sri Lankan state regulation, referred to as the “Family Background Report” (FBR), which restricts the transnational labor migration of women with children under the age of five. Since the early 1980s, women from Sri Lanka have worked as domestic servants in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. A culture of migration has developed, and labourers’ remittances sustain family financial strategies. The FBR regulations narrow people’s employment options and destabilize long-standing practices of intergenerational reciprocity. Using ethnographic data gathered in 2015, the chapter considers the potential and actual …

Sexual Initiation Among Canadian Youth: A Model Comparison Approach Of Evolutionary Hypotheses Shows Greatest Support For Extrinsic Mortality Cues, Intergenerational Conflict, And Early Life Psychosocial Stressors, Kristin Snopkowski, John P. Ziker

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Early life factors are associated with the timing of reproductive events in adolescence, but a variety of hypotheses (such as psychosocial acceleration theory, paternal investment theory, extrinsic mortality, internal prediction, and intergenerational conflict) propose different explanations for why this may occur. To compare between these theories, we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, an extensive, longitudinal survey of Canadian male and female youth (aged 14-15 in last wave) to identify variables that uniquely support these different models (n≈1200). We identify the best predictors of sexual initiation for each hypothesis and then use a model selection procedure to …

“Their Markers As They Go”: Modified Trees As Waypoints In The Dena’Ina Cultural Landscape, Alaska, Douglas Deur, Jamie Hebert

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Inland Dena’ina, an Athabaskan people of south-central Alaska, produce and value Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) in myriad ways. Ethnographic interviews and field visits conducted with Inland Dena’ina residents of the village of Nondalton, Alaska, reveal the centrality of CMTs in the creation and valuation of an Indigenous cultural landscape. CMTs serve as waypoints along trails, as Dena’ina people travel across vast distances to hunt wide-ranging caribou herds and fish salmon ascending rivers from Bristol Bay. CMTs also provide bark and sap used in Dena’ina material culture and medicines, leaving signature marks upon the spruce, birch, and other trees found …

Between “Us” And “Them”: Political Subjectivities In The Shadows Of The 2018 Brazilian Election, Charles H. Klein, Milena Mateuzi Carmo, Alessandra Tavares

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines political subjectivities, community engagements and voting practices among residents of São Paulo’s Zona Sul peripheries in the three years preceding Brazil’s 2018 presidential election. Building on a 398-person household survey, 46 in-depth interviews, and extensive participation observation over the course of a fouryear study, we argue that although most residents of our study communities across the political spectrum are disenchanted with institutional politics, many maintain political engagement through their everyday lives, including activism centered on intersectional identities and state-sponsored violence/genocide. Our discussion combines statistical analysis and auto-ethnographic inflected vignettes and is in dialogue with two common themes …

Walking Dena’Ina: A Cultural Landscape Report For The Telaquana Trail, Douglas Deur, Jamie Hebert, John Branson, Tricia Brown

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Telaquana Trail is an ancient pathway ascending from the shores of Qizhjeh Vena, Lake Clark, through tundra and timbered valleys, into a high-elevation expanse of rolling tundra and smaller interior lakes nearly 50 miles north of Lake Clark. The pathway is an ancestral corridor used by Native peoples since the beginning of remembered time. Though the archaeological record of the trail is still coming into focus, it lends us important clues about the trail and how it was used. For example, archaeological evidence at places like Twin Lakes and Snipe Lake suggests that ancestral Native communities occupied and traveled …

Proper Conjugation Of Bodies: Chastity, Age, And Care Work In Sri Lankan Migrants’ Families, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Physical and symbolic aspects of bodies limit the migration trajectories of female domestic workers from a Buddhist community in coastal Sri Lanka. Government regulations and family decisions regarding women’s overseas labour draw upon and in turn influence discourses about gender, sexuality, age, health, and class. This ethnographic analysis illustrates that local norms task women with nurturing the brains of babies, preserving the chastity of teenage daughters, caring for frail elders, and preventing their working-class husbands from overindulging in liquor or having sex with other women. Successful social reproduction depends on the proper conjunctions of bodies in the extended family. Corporeal …

Small Group Learning Is Associated With Reduced Salivary Cortisol And Testosterone In Undergraduate Students, Kristin Snopkowski, Kathryn Demps, Ross Griffiths, Karen S. Fulk, Scott May, Kimberly Neagle, Kayla Downs, Michaela Eugster, Tessa Amend

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Small group learning activities have been shown to improve student academic performance and educational outcomes. Yet, we have an imperfect understanding of the mechanisms by which this occurs. Group learning may mediate student stress by placing learning in a context where students have both social support and greater control over their learning. We hypothesize that one of the methods by which small group activities improve learning is by mitigating student stress. To test this, we collected physiological measures of stress and self-reported perceived stress from 26 students in two undergraduate classes. Salivary cortisol and testosterone were measured within students across …

Ancient Maya Wetland Fields Revealed Under Tropical Forest Canopy From Laser Scanning And Multiproxy Evidence, Timothy Beach, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Samantha Krause, Tom Guderjan, Fred Valdez Jr., Juan Carlos Fernandez-Diaz, Sara Eshleman, Colin Doyle

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We report on a large area of ancient Maya wetland field systems in Belize, Central America, based on airborne lidar survey coupled with multiple proxies and radiocarbon dates that reveal ancient field uses and chronology. The lidar survey indicated four main areas of wetland complexes, including the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex that is five times larger than earlier remote and ground survey had indicated, and revealed a previously unknown wetland field complex that is even larger. The field systems date mainly to the Maya Late and Terminal Classic (∼1,400–1,000 y ago), but with evidence from as early as …

When God Put Daylight On Earth We Had One Voice': Kwakwaka'wakw Perspectives On Sustainability And The Rights Of Nature, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Adam Dick

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this chapter the authors ask: How are the 'Rights of Nature' truly manifested in an indigenous context? We contend that one especially illuminating example can be found in the teaching of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of coastal British Columbia. The Kwakwaka'wakw are among the most studied indigenous people in Americas, and are thus a key reference point, providing a rich tradition that is widely known and accessible through accounts of past anthropologists and a handful of living experts.

The authors of this article all speak from deep groundings in Kwakwaka'wakw tradition.

Investigating How Faculty Social Networks And Peer Influence Relate To Knowledge And Use Of Evidence-Based Teaching Practices, J. P. Ziker, B. Earl, S. E. Shadle

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Calls for science education reform have been made for decades in the USA. The recent call to produce one million new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates over 10 years highlights the need to employ evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in undergraduate STEM classes to create engaging and effective learning environments. EBIPs are teaching strategies that have been empirically demonstrated to positively impact student learning, attitudes, and achievement in STEM disciplines. However, the mechanisms and processes by which faculty learn about and choose to implement EBIPs remain unclear. To explore this problem area, we used social network analysis to …

An Exploration Of Attitudes Toward Dogs Among College Students In Bangalore, India, Shelly Volsche, Miriam Mohan, Peter B. Gray, Madhavi Rangaswamy

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Conversations in the field of anthrozoology include treatment and distinction of food animals, animals as workers versus pests, and most recently, emerging pet trends including the practice of pet parenting. This paper explores attitudes toward pet dogs in the shared social space of urban India. The data include 375 pen-and-paper surveys from students at CHRIST (Deemed to be University) in Bangalore, India. Reflecting upon Serpell’s biaxial concept of dogs as a relationship of affect and utility, the paper considers the growing trend of pet dog keeping in urban spaces and the increased use of affiliative words to describe these …

Paying It Forward Or Giving Back?: Women’S Sharing Networks In Siberia, John P. Ziker, Karen S. Fulk

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Subsistence food sharing in Ust’-Avam (Taimyr Region, Russian Federation) is analyzed in light of Arctic research on sharing and current debate. Cultural traditions such as food sharing practices are widespread across indigenous communities in the Arctic and are arguably fundamental to the sustainability of indigenous Arctic cultures and their ability to buffer against environmental disequilibrium. Sharing diaries from 10 respondents over 12 weeks in August and October 2001, describe 162 distributions among 69 household dyads. Independent variables, including household relatedness, reciprocal sharing, and interaction effects, influence the documented food sharing pattern. Economic need and social association also influence sharing. Indicators …

A Comment From Mark G. Plew On Kir’Yak’S Portable Engravings Of The Northeastern Paleoasiatics, Mark G. Plew

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Jan Kee and I published a note on incised stones from Idaho (Kee and Plew 2015). The paper was based on a presentation on portable art of Western North America presented at the 2014 SAA meetings and published in JONA. We described four distinct types that occur in different geographic settings in association with different site types and over a period of several thousand years, though more common in the Late Holocene. These included stones with parallel lines located on the face or margins of stones with horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines—or a combination. A second type was characterized …