"The Doctor Told Us What He Wanted": Sam Koenig's Instructions to WPA Ethnic Group Survey Interviewers

The instructions given to Connecticut's Federal Writers' ProjectEthnic Group Survey interviewers seventy years ago by the Survey'sdirector, Samuel Koenig, raise many issues relevant to interviewingin today's digital age. Regardless of technology, or the lackthereof, how such instructions are followed help to determinethe quality of an interview.     

The Archaeology of Cosmic Impact: Lessons from Two Mid-Holocene Argentine Case Studies

Cosmic impact is a category of natural catastrophe neglected or misunderstood by most archaeologists in reconstructions of past human population dynamics. We discuss the nature of impact by asteroids and comets and what is known and theorized about the Quaternary Period impact record. As case studies for our exploration of how archaeological method and theory can be productively applied to the study of cosmic impact, we focus on two confirmed Holocene asteroid impacts in central and northeastern Argentina, Rio Cuarto and Campo del Cielo, both likely dating between 6 and 3 cal ky BP. We model and assess the potential destructive effects of these impacts on contemporary hunting and gathering populations using several lines of evidence. The search for Quaternary Period cosmic impacts, along with the documentation of the effects of confirmed cosmic impacts on human populations, particularly of those organized in small-scale social groups, represents a challenge and key opportunity for future archaeological research.     

Deconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey?

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Explaining variation in hunter-gatherer livelihoods hinges on our ability to predict the tradeoffs and opportunities of pursuing different kinds of...     

Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act

This paper deals with issues of political dissent and the geography of state power through the lens of a particular law and its deployment by the US state in the context of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by American Indian Movement activists and local residents. I explore how the state responded to the highly mediated nature of the Wounded Knee occupation through tactics that minimized the visibility of its efforts to contain the protest. These efforts, I argue, also constituted a broader politics of scale. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the intersection of protest, scale and publicity. I then use the empirical example of the H Rap Brown Act to show how these dynamics were being reworked in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, I place the emergence of the H Rap Brown Act within a context of changing geographies of race and state power, more specifically as they were articulated around the unrest that was engulfing American cities. I then analyze how the law was deployed by the state during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what the case of the H Rap Brown Act has to tell us more broadly about our theoretical understandings of the geographies of public protest.     

世界考古学展望

许多考古学家都期望,最终会有一种统一的世界考古学,那将是一门客观的、价值取向自由的学科。对他们而言,达不到这点就意味着未能取得科学实践的一种起码准则。我认为,这是对考古学现状与未来过于简单和错误的看法。一个多世纪以来,这个学科的某些方面已经有效地国际化了,但其他方面仍有很大差异。除非世界上消除了国别、阶级或性别的差异,这种差异似乎在可见的未来都不会缩小。