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Biological and Physical Anthropology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Biological and Physical Anthropology

The Dirt On The Collins Mounds Site, Carmelita Angeles Aug 2016

The Dirt On The Collins Mounds Site, Carmelita Angeles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Building monumental architecture has been one method used by humans to rise above an earthbound existence. In the United States, large earthen mounds were constructed from the Archaic period to the Mississippian period. The Collins Mound Site in Arkansas was recently dated to the Late Woodland period. For this study, soil samples were extracted from the northern section of the site for description and particle-size analysis. Erosion from plowing, wind, water, and gravity is the most likely process causing a decreased mound height and increased basal diameter. Mound fill likely originated near the river for two of the mounds and …


A Gnawing Problem: Does Rodent Incisor Microwear Record Diet Or Habitat?, Salvatore Samuel Caporale May 2016

A Gnawing Problem: Does Rodent Incisor Microwear Record Diet Or Habitat?, Salvatore Samuel Caporale

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dental microwear has been shown to reflect food preferences and habitat in extant vertebrates, and its analysis has been applied to fossil assemblages to infer paleodiet and paleoenvironment. Such reconstructions are, of course, only as good as the extant baseline used to infer relationships between wear pattern and diet/habitat. This study tests, through dental microwear texture analysis, the potential of modern rodent lower incisors to reveal those relationships, and evaluates the extent to which effects of diet and habitat can be parsed from the signal. Microwear texture profiles were created for individual lower rodent incisors (n=430) using confocal profilometry and …