Foodways Archaeology: A Decade of Research from the Southeastern United States

Interest in the study of foodways through an archaeological lens, particularly in the American Southeast, is evident in the abundance of literature on this topic over the past decade. Foodways as a concept includes all of the activities, rules, and meanings that surround the production, harvesting, processing, cooking, serving, and consumption of food. We study foodways and components of foodways archaeologically through direct and indirect evidence. The current synthesis is concerned with research themes in the archaeology of Southeastern foodways, including feasting, gender, social and political status, and food insecurity. In this review, I explore the information that can be learned from material remains of the foodstuffs themselves and the multiple lines of evidence that can help us better understand the meanings, rituals, processes, and cultural meanings and motivations of foodways.     

Household Archaeology in the Southeastern United States: History,Trends, and Challenges

This review highlights archaeological investigations of prehistoric and historic households in southeastern North America. There are a number of inherent challenges to the archaeology of households in the region, including generally poor preservation and a long history of relatively insubstantial domestic architecture. An appraisal of the historical development of household archaeology developed slowly in the Southeast, largely in reaction to trends in other areas of the world. Over the last decade, however, southeastern archaeologists have been at the vanguard of the application of new approaches to households. From an early focus on generalizable patterns of domestic activities and behavior, researchers increasingly view households as historical constructs situated within larger landscapes. Prominent areas of concern include enduring issues such as status variation, production, and consumption but also newer themes such as gender, identity and ethnicity, agency and power, and ritual and symbolism. Some of the most innovative studies explore the intersections of these topics. Conceptual and methodological challenges remain, but the household endures as a practical and productive focus of analysis and interpretation for southeastern archaeologists more than 30 years after household research in the area began.     

Geostatistical Analysis of County-Level Lung Cancer Mortality Rates in the Southeastern United States

The analysis of health data and putative covariates, such as environmental, socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, or occupational factors, is a promising application for geostatistics. Transferring methods originally developed for the analysis of earth properties to health science, however, presents several methodological and technical challenges. These arise because health data are typically aggregated over irregular spatial supports (e.g., counties) and consist of a numerator and a denominator (i.e., rates). This article provides an overview of geostatistical methods tailored specifically to the characteristics of areal health data, with an application to lung cancer mortality rates in 688 U.S. counties of the southeast (1970–1994). Factorial Poisson kriging can filter short-scale variation and noise, which can be large in sparsely populated counties, to reveal similar regional patterns for male and female cancer mortality that correlate well with proximity to shipyards. Rate uncertainty was transferred through local cluster analysis using stochastic simulation, allowing the computation of the likelihood of clusters of low or high cancer mortality. Accounting for population size and rate uncertainty led to the detection of new clusters of high mortality around Oak Ridge National Laboratory for both sexes, in counties with high concentrations of pig farms and paper mill industries for males (occupational exposure) and in the vicinity of Atlanta for females.     

The identification and significance of Apalachicola for the origins of the Creek Indians in the Southeastern United States

Apalachicola was a Hitchitee community that was considered the capital of the Creek Nation during the seventeenth and eighteenth century in the Southeastern United States. The role of this community in the formation of the southeastern political and cultural geography is paramount because of their coalescence with emigrant Muscogee people. In this article, I synthesize 10 years of research at the site and clarify the population history of this community. The research demonstrates the formation of the Creek culture area in the material record. Pottery surface decoration becomes measurably homogenous and I interpret this pattern as a result of that cultural development.     

解构与重建:历史类博物馆展陈中考古文物信息的跨学科解读

考古文物是我国历史类博物馆的核心展品,在其主要社会职能中扮演了举足轻重的角色.随着考古学阐释理念的不断发展和完善,以物证史法、情境展示法、关联阐释法等已被逐渐应用到博物馆展陈中.但以传统考古学为核心的阐释方法在公众传播过程中仍然存在着单一视角与多元需求的矛盾、学科思维与展陈逻辑的矛盾、学术规范与启发教育的矛盾.对于历史...     

The Rise,Fall, and Transformation of Native American Cultures in the Southeastern United States

The culture area of Southeast United States saw the rise of the most complex societies in Native America north of Mexico before European contact. Many of these societies developed with matrilineal kinship systems. Some built impressive mounds. The “Southeast” volume of the Handbook of North American Indians presents numerous chapters that reconstruct the prehistory, history, and cultures found in this region and chronicle the European exploration and colonization that impacted the region's cultures. The differences between the prehistoric and postcolonial cultures are so great that they appear as different cultural traditions.     

Cultural policy as development policy: evidence from the United States

Cultural policies and cultural projects in the United States have been reframed to emphasize their economic benefits to cities. New alliances between arts advocates and place promoters are apparent at all levels, but are most prominent locally. These new alliances are facilitated by the changing interests of local officials and business people, who have come to believe there is economic value in the arts and of arts administrators, for whom attracting broader public support has become imperative. In some cities, entirely new organizational structures have sprung up to plan and implement projects that serve cultural and economic development advocates simultaneously. Such new institutions are most prominent in more economically disadvantaged cities.     

Trade and culture: the United States

ABSTRACT

The US government has long held that cultural goods and services represent an economic sector like any other and should be liberalized. The American cultural and digital industries enjoy a strong competitive advantage and constitute a leading export sector. This US stance has antagonized many countries pursuing cultural policies. This has led the US government to soften its trade strategy and accept financial measures, as well as a broader array of ‘traditional’ cultural regulatory instruments. At the same time, the United States insists on the absence of restrictions in digital networks, through which cultural contents are to be increasingly distributed and accessed. Under the negative-list negotiating approach, whereby everything is liberalized save for specific exceptions, states parties to US trade agreements have secured a varying array of measures. However, only a handful, essentially industrial countries, have secured digital exceptions, the latter coupled with conditions raising questions concerning their applicability.     

Species Associations Among Insect Remains from Urban Archaeological Deposits and their Significance in Reconstructing the Past Human Environment

Assemblages of archaeological insect (mainly Coleoptera) remains from in and around Anglo-Scandinavian buildings at 16–22 Coppergate, York, were investigated in order to identify associations between pairs and groups of species, and to determine the significance of those associations as indicators of past human activity and living conditions. Following initial exploration, a pairwise measure of association was used to establish working groups of co-occurring species, which were then related to their likely habitats. Detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA) was used to test the groups. Robust and consistent species associations were identified among the death assemblages. The groups defined by the analyses usually corresponded to the ecological preferences of species, although some groups of species would not be found together at the present day. Some groups probably represented complexes of habitats that occurred together in the past, and not single communities, and some may be peculiar to Coppergate and similar sites. It is suggested that the species associations are of value in assemblage interpretation, and that variations in associations among sites will reflect archaeologically significant aspects of the sites.     

Australia's relationship with the United States: the case for greater independence

A number of recent events—especially attempts to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement and Australia's participation in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq—have thrown Australia's relationship with the United States into sharp relief. While this relationship has historically enjoyed strong bilateral endorsement, such uncritical support is beginning to unravel. At the very least, the relationship is being subjected to a renewed, more critical scrutiny. This paper argues that a dispassionate analysis of the relationship is appropriate and overdue. Not only are the benefits that accrue to ‘Australia’ from the relationship debateable, even when judged within the limited calculus of the ‘national interest’, but Australia's uncritical support for US foreign policy is also helping to entrench potentially damaging aspects of American foreign policy and— somewhat ironically—undermining the legitimacy of its pre-eminent ‘hege monic’ position.     

Analyzing cut marks: lessons from artiodactyl remains in the northwestern United States

Analyses and interpretations of the human behavioral significance of frequencies of cut-marked mammal bones have been ongoing for at least 50 years. Many of these studies focus on determining the so-called “butchering pattern.” Few analysts comment on the tremendous range of variation in frequencies and anatomical distributions of cut marks across multiple assemblages of remains of a taxon. Such variation is evident even when faunal remains are associated with technologically, temporally, and environmentally similar cultures. This kind of variation is illustrated with frequencies of cut marked bone specimens comprising major limb joints of two artiodactyl genera from two sites in the northwestern United States. Three hypotheses are tested. The first and second hypotheses (one per genus) predict that the frequencies of cut-marked remains of a taxon from one site will match those frequencies evident on the remains of the same taxon at the other site. Both hypotheses are falsified. The third hypothesis is that remains of the larger taxon at each site will display more cut marks than the remains of the smaller taxon at each site. This hypothesis is statistically falsified at one site but not the other. Refutation of the hypotheses suggests that well-founded interpretations of frequencies of cut-marked remains may require unique kinds of contextual data.     

Regional Exchange Rate Indexes for the United States

In this paper we construct exchange rate indexes for the nine U.S. Bureau of the Census regions. The results indicate there are nontrivial differences between them and an identically created overall U.S. exchange rate index. The national index is cointegrated with only two of these regional indexes, and in a Granger sense, it is causing one regional index. In addition, our results indicate that two of the regional exchange rate indexes are interchangeable with the national index. These results show that researchers investigating how exchange rate changes affect regional exports or regional economic growth should be cautious in making inferences based upon a national exchange rate index.