Anthropology Commons^™

Why Should Fathers Father?, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The findings about the ways in which components of men's human capital is translated into human capital of offspring are intriguing both for what the findings show about secular trends in fertility, consequences for child accomplishment, and for what they show about the importance of the child's mother in linking the father to the child. It is this issue, the mother as link to child and the nature of the father's relationships with the mother that I make the center of my remarks.

There are several things to keep in mind when we try to grasp the evolutionary big picture …

Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project: Report Of The 1998 Season, Michael Hoff, Nicholas K. Rauh, Rhys Townsend, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

During the 1998 season the Rough Cilicia Survey team shifted the focus of our research to the discovery and analysis of rural sites and rural field tracks in the southern coastal portion of the survey zone (between ancient Selinus, modern Gazipasha, and ancient Nephelion (modern Muzkent). To learn more about historic landscape use in the area, the field team surveyed 21 transects comprising more than 17 linear kilometers of survey terrain. To record our finds we employed GPS tracking devices to track our progress on 1:5000 topographical maps acquired from the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlügü (all sites are identified …

Institutional, Evolutionary, And Demographic Contexts Of Gender Roles: A Case Study Of !Kung Bushmen, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In this chapter I have two objectives. One is to detail the consequences of changes in social structure for gender roles and to show how economic change affects the lives of males and females. The second objective is to explain how my perspective on the relationship between behavior and social structure has changed over time. More particularly, I have been influenced by ideas in evolutionary biology. Although I still see human beings as embedded in a cultural context, I also see that other insights come by viewing humans as another mammalian and primate species. These ideas will be elaborated more …

Review Of The Prehistoric Pueblo World A.D. 1150-1350, Edited By Michael A. Adler. Tucson: The University Of Arizona Press, 1996. 279 Pages, Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Excerpt:

This volume provides the reader with very useful summaries and overviews of the archaeological record for the prehistoric Pueblo III period. It also introduces the reader to a broad range of research topics-models of demographic change, population aggregation, local and regional “abandonment,” architectural variation, settlement layout(s), living space, aspects of community integration, ceramic assemblages, land-use practices, carrying capacity, conflict, exchange, and macro regional interaction-that have been addressed recently in this area. In addition, this volume contains data about settlement numbers, sizes, and distributions for seventy-the districts within twelve regions. Districts were delineated on the basis of archeological patterns, established …

The Roasted And The Boiled: Food Composition And Heat Treatment With Special Emphasis On Pit-Hearth Cooking, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Heat treatment is one of the major ways humans change the composition and chemistry of food tissues, making them more digestible, less toxic, and more durable. This paper reviews salient features of food chemistry and food composition and how heat treatment, especially pit-hearth cooking, affects that composition. Ethnographic accounts of cooking indicate that traditional populations relied on pit-hearth cooking especially to alter the composition of foods high in either lipids or complex carbohydrates. Historically, pit hearths were also used to process large quantities of food. Various kinds of pit hearths figure prominently in the archaeological deposits of the American Great …

Review Of Sanumá Memories: Yanomami Ethnography In A Time Of Crisis. Alcida Rita Ramos. Madison: University Of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Xx, 346 Pp. (Paper)., Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

As I have done considerable research among the Yanomamö,1 it was with anticipation that I received notice of Alcida Ramos' publication of Sanumá Memories. This work is a useful contribution to the large and still expanding research on the Yanomamö, an Amazonian people who have become a classic case study for anthropology and the social sciences. They are probably the most widely read about tribal people in the world, largely a consequence of Napoleon Chagnon's immensely popular ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People (first published in 1968 and the most recent edition in 1992).

The Yanomamö have become a focal point …

Review Of Archaeology And Geographical Information Systems: A European Perspective, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Although but six years old, our library copy of Interpreting Space: GIS and Archaeology (1990; edited by Allen, Stanton, and Zubrow) is tattered and in need of rebinding. Such has been the interest in this volume and its subject, the adaptation of Geographic Information System (GIs) technology to archaeological needs. Archaeology and Geographical information Systems complements Interpreting Space in several ways. Where the latter features mostly North American authors, European authors are the main contributors to the former. An4 in an effort to educate readers, the first offers brief reviews of hardware, software, and GIS concepts; such items are mentioned …

Describing And Comparing Archaeological Spatial Structures, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Quantitative archaeological spatial analysis today is radically different from that introduced more than 20 years ago. Today spatial analysis is couched in more general formational terms that include earlier functional pursuits. Today spatial analysts (1) focus on individual formationally sensitive artifact or element attributes, rather than on types; (2) use distributional rather than partitive methods and techniques; (3) consider a suite of such attributes to construct the formational history of archaeological deposits; and, least commonly, (4) undertake comparative spatial analysis. An elaboration of the latter tactic is proposed here, that of characterizing spatial structure in terms of structural elements (or …

Cattle, Co-Wives, Children, And Calabashes: Material Context For Symbol Use Among The Il Chamus Of West-Central Kenya, Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper examines systemic contexts for symbol use among the Maa-speaking Il Chamus in the Lake Baringo region of west-central Kenya. The systemic context for symbols and material culture consists of the environmental constraints and behavioral responses that characterize pastoralist life in East Africa. The author's interest in this problem developed in response to Ian Hodder’s work among the Il Chamus, Pokot, and Tugen in the Baringo District. Unlike Hodder, however, the author argues that symbols and their use in East Africa can be more productively explained from a materialist perspective. Specifically, it is proposed that symbols affixed to certain …

Analytical Perspectives On A Protohistoric Cache Of Ceramic Jars From The Lower Colorado Desert, James Bayman, Richard Hevly, Boma Johnson, Karl J. Reinhard, Richard Ryan

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

A cache of hermetically sealed ceramic jars found in the Lower Colorado Desert was examined using chronometric dating, pollen and macrofossil extraction, design analysis, and water retention experimentation. The cache apparently dates to the protohistoric fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Findings from these studies contribute to knowledge in four problem areas: (1) ceramic jar function and use-history; (2) storage technology and caching behavior; (3) ceramic dating and chronology; and (4) symbolic iconography. Biotic remains from inside the jars document their use for transporting a variety of riverine and desert plants, before they were finally filled with flowers and seeds, and placed …

Costs And Benefits Of Monogamy And Polygyny For Yanomamö Women, Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In this paper I analyze some of the economic costs and benefits of monogamy and polygyny for Yanomamö women. The evolutionary ecological model of resource defense polygyny predicts that when female choice is operative females will choose those males who control resources that will maximize a female’s reproductive success. A female will choose a polygynous strategy (i.e., become a co-wife) if a currently married male has more resources to offer than other unmarried males or monogamous males. This model has been successfully used to predict polygynous mating in tribal societies where males are stratified in terms of their ownership or …

Ams Dating Of Plain Weave Sandals From The Central Colorado Plateau., Phil R. Geib

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

AMS radiocarbon dates on plain-weave sandals from caves of the central Colorado Plateau are reported. The sandals range in age from about 6900 to 3200 B.P. (ca. 5700-1450 cal. B.C.). The findings strengthen a case for both population and cultural continuity during the Archaic period, and support a related argument that middle Archaic break in the occupancy of several important shelters such as Cowboy Cave resulted from settlement pattern change and not regional abandonment. The dates demonstrate that living accumulations within some shelters of lower Glen Canyon resulted from Archaic foragers and not Puebloan farmers as previously claimed. Benchmark Cave, …

Review Of Kalinga Ethnoarchaeology: Expanding Archaeological Method And Theory, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In the 1960s, several practitioners (James Deetz, James Hill, William Longacre, and Robert Whallon) of what was eventually called the "New Archaeology" used ceramic stylistic elements to support claims about the postmarital residence of prehistoric populations. In particular, Hill and Longacre argued for two post-A.D. 1000 pueblos in Arizona that the observed lack of variation in ceramic stylistic elements was owed to the practice of matrilocal residence. Anthropologically informed common sense grounded their assumptions that females, schooled by their mothers, were responsible for ceramic production. These interpretations especially the under-supported assumptions---were criticized on many counts.

Aboriginal Adaptations On The Colorado Plateau: A View From The Island-In-The-Sky, Canyonlands National Park, Utah, Alan J. Osborn, Jesslyn Brown, Galen Burgett, Linda Scott Cummings, Ralph J. Hartley, Susan Vetter, Jennifer Waters, Tony Zalucha

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This final report documents the results of archaeological inventory, excavation, and analysis of prehistoric cultural resources within a 45-kilometer (28-mile) long corridor in the Island-in-the-Sky District of Canyonlands National Park, Utah. During three field seasons of survey, mapping, and excavation in 1983-1985, the research team recorded 32 artifact scatters, plotted 90,000 prehistoric artifacts and 250 historic items, completed 600 one-square-meter test pits, and conducted 10 block excavations. Block excavations at two locations in Gray's Pasture revealed a plant processing/hunting field camp (42SA16858) and a disturbed pithouse (42SA8506). Associated features and materials included a puddled clay-lined hearth, a slab-lined pit, a …

Review Of Skeletal Biology In The Great Plains: Migration, Warfare, Health, And Subsistence, Edited By Douglas W. Owsley And Richard L. Jantz. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. 415 Pages., Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

The editors and contributors to this large, impressive volume present thirty-two chapters that deal with Great Plains skeletal biology. The goal of these diverse investigations was to derive critical information from human skeletal remains about past inhabitants of the Plains, including prehistoric and historic Indians, as well as Euro-Americans. These contributions are organized topically into five parts: (1) archaeology; (2) demography and paleopathology; (3) biological distance measures and skeletal morphology; (4) diet and subsistence strategies; and (5) warfare. The studies represent the collaborative efforts of archaeologists, physical anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnohistorians, and physical scientists. A major impetus for these …

Cultural Considerations In The Experience Of Aging: Two African Cultures, Patricia Draper, Henry Harpending

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

We have three general conclusions to emphasize as well as an observation about aging in these [!Kung and Herero] societies that we believe deserves elaboration:

1. Old people are treated well in both these groups but not because they are scarce. Both the !Kung and the Herero are low-fertility populations so the proportion of the total population that is old is high in both groups.

2. Old people do not appreciate what appears to be the good (!Kung) and superb (Herero) social support that they receive. They have nothing good to say about being old. While we perceived very positive …

Review Of The Origins Of Agriculture And Settled Life By Richard S. Macneish. Norman And London: University Of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 433 Pages., Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Excerpt:

Following a brief review of the "environmentalist's" (e. g., Ratzel, de Candolle, Childe, Braidwood, and Flannery) and the "materialist's" (e. g., Marx, Vavilov, D. Harris, Binford, and Cohen) accounts, MacNeish presents his "trilinear theory." It consists of "three hypothetical models and three hypotheticaI sets of causes" for the development of plant domestication and sedentism. This "trilinear theory" is a world culture history similar to the multilinear developmental frameworks proposed "by Julian Steward (The Theory of Culture Chtange: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, 1955). MacNeish's multilinear scheme is cross-cut by three developmental stages, i. e., food collectors, transitional …

The Character Of Surface Archaeological Deposits And Its Influence On Survey Accuracy, Luann Wandsnider, Eileen Camilli

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Survey is one of the primary methods of data collection in archaeology today. Survey data often constitute the sole conserved record of the prehistoric use of an area and are used as the foundation for culture historical, demographic, and economic reconstructions. Given the fundamental nature of survey data in relation to other archaeological pursuits, identification of biases inherent in this type of data are important and have been the subject of a number of stimulating studies. Analyses reported here focus on the accuracy of results produced through intensive survey. Using data from several siteless surveys in the American West, the …

Remembering The Past: !Kung Life History Narratives, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This chapter will examine the social and economic changes that !Kung women have experienced in the last seventy or so years by means of life history narratives collected from five older !Kung or "Zhun/wa" women, as the !Kung call themselves. The women whose stories form the basis of this report were all living in the western Kalahari Desert of Ngamiland, Botswana in 1987-88 when the author was carrying out anthropological field work. Many changes have affected the !Kung in the last several decades. A brief discussion of these changes is given below to provide a background for the interpretation of …

The Spatial Dimension Of Time, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Archaeological research depends on the temporal structural of archaeological deposits. Temporal structure includes deposit age and the sequencing or the relative temporal order of one deposit to another. Another aspect is the temporal scale and resolution, or the degree of contemporaneity shared by deposits, Archaeology is also concerned with ethnographic time, that domain in which formation events occur, i.e., the temporal characteristics of activities with respect to the piece of land on which those activities occur. This chapter explores the issue of temporal resolution or deposit grain is it relates to the tempo of use witnessed by a locale.

Review Of The Archaeology Of Regions: A Case For Full-Coverage Survey By Suzanne K. Fish And Stephen A. Kowalewski, Eds., Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The goal of this volume is “to expand the explicit rationale for [full-coverage survey], to affirm it as a practicable technique, and to illustrate its superiority as a basis for archaeological inference” (p. 2). Full-coverage survey (FCS) involves “the systematic examination of contiguous blocks of terrain at a uniform level of intensity” (p. 2), but stipulates no minimum areal extent and no special intensity of coverage. This volume argues that justification for expending limited resources on FCS lies in its potential to capture settlement patterns, which somehow reflect settlement systems and which cannot be approached by sample survey.
S. Fish …

An Isolated Storage Vessel At Site 42sa20779 In Glen Canyon National Recreation Area: Adaptive Storage And Caching Behavior In The Prehistoric Southwest, Anne M. Wolley, Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This report documents the excavation and analysis of a large, isolated ceramic vessel discovered in the spring of 1988 in the Hite Marina area of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah Project #89-NA-051N. Several college students from Western State College in Colorado (Dean Brian, Matt How, Cathy Arvey, and Mike Donaldson) were hiking in the area when Dean Brian discovered the pot. Aware of the possible significance of such a find, Matt How immediately contacted Park Archaeologist Kris Kincaid and informed her of the vessel's location. Matt later returned with his family, Micky and JoNell How, when archaeologists Kincaid and …

Dietary And Parasitological Aanalysis Of Coprolites Recovered From Mummy 5, Ventana Cave, Arizona, Karl J. Reinhard, Richard H. Hevly

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Four coprolites were excavated with Burial 5 at Ventena Cave, a partially mummified five-year-old child. Two coprolites were granular and dark in color and two were fibrous and light in color. The coprolites are remains of the child's intestinal contents and were submitted for dietary and parasitological analysis. No parasites were found. The fibrous coprolites proved to be remains of highly masticated mesquite pods (Prosopis). The granular coprolites consist of seeds of saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea). Pollen analysis reveals two dietary pollen types, both derived from cactus. No evidence of cultivated plants except for a trace …

Personality Development In Evolutionary Perspective, Patricia Draper, Jay Belsky

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

A relationship between personality processes and evolution can be seen when behaviors associated with sexual maturation, mating, and parenting are examined This article stipulates the types of proximal cues implicated in the shaping of personality variables that become important in the development of the individual's reproductive behavior

Review Of Early Prehistoric Agriculture In The American Southwest, By W. H. Wills. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School Of American Research Press, 1988. 196 Pages., Alan J. Osborn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Last paragraph:

Wills's book provides archeologists with an innovative account of why and how past hunter-gatherers initially expanded their food-getting activities to include the cultivation of domesticated crops. His study makes use of a variety of subjects including r- and K-selection, density-dependent responses, risk minimization, the forager-collector continuum, maize phenology, Holocene environments, technological change, stylistic variation, social boundaries, and mating networks. Wills also offers new information and reassessments of the archeological record at Bat, Tularosa, Cordova, and Cienega Creek caves in the Mogollon highlands. He approaches the archeological literature for the American Southwest with healthy skepticism. And he challenges many …

African Marriage Systems: Perspectives From Evolutionary Ecology, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

There are many characteristics of contemporary African societies that puzzle demographers and others concerned with economic and social modernization. One of the most prominent is that the birth rate remains in both urban and rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa in spite of the presence of several factors that supposedly promote lowering of fertility (McNicoll 1980). Some of these factors are increased survivorship of children into adulthood, increased availability of education and levels of educational attainment (for both sexes), increased urbanization, and increased monetarization of the economy via migratory wage labor and cash cropping. Each of these is normally thought to …

A Sociobiological Perspective On The Development Of Human Reproductive Strategies, Patricia Draper, Henry Harpending

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Humans show a great deal of variability in their reproductive behavior, including types of sexual activity, types of ties between males and females, and ways of arranging for the rearing of offspring. We will consider three principal topics: (1) Father absence versus father presence, contrasting children who are reared in a family system in which there is a closely involved and economically contributing father in contrast to a family system in which women rear their children in cooperation with other women (usually kin) and without consistent help from a man who is father to children. (2) Peer rearing versus parent …

On The Nature And Antiquity Of The Manix Lake Industry, Douglas Bamforth, Ronald Dorn

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The antiquity of human occupation in the New World undoubtedly is one of the major unresolved culture-historical problems in North American prehistory. On the one hand, a dominant position with a long history in American archaeology (cf. Wilmsen 1965) holds that human beings arrived in the New World at the close of the Pleistocene, no longer than 12,000 years ago, and that Clovis sites represent the oldest occupation in the Americas (Haynes 1970; Martin 1973; Waters 1985). On the other hand, a less widely accepted school of thought sees a variety of evidence for human occupation in the Americas well …

The Allocation Of Parental Care Among The Ye'kwana, Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

It is well known that human children require more care or parental investment than any other primate species (Lancaster and Lancaster 1983). While this dimension of human behavior is well documented in the psychological literature for Euroamerican populations (Babchuck et al. 1985), it has received scant, quantitative attention by anthropologists working among tribal populations (for exceptions see Whiting and Whiting 1975, Katz and Konner 1981, Hurtado et al. 1985, Hewlett, this volume (Chapter 16), Turke, this volume (Chapter 10)). The role of alloparental care (care of non-offspring children) has received even less quantitative attention by social scientists (for a review …

Technological Change And Child Behavior Among The !Kung, Patricia Draper, Elizabeth Cashdan

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

How does change in one part of a social system affect other parts? This is the central question that must be answered in order to understand the process through which culture changes. This paper is about a small piece of the problem. It investigates how changes in subsistence economy affect child behavior and the relations between parents and children among !Kung Bushmen of Western Botswana. We will show that the adoption of a sedentary life style and a new technology of food production is associated with changes in the social interactions between parents and children and between children and their …