The northern fluted point complex: technological and morphological evidence of adaptation and risk in the late Pleistocene-early Holocene Arctic

Analyses of fluted point technology and Paleoindian technological risk have contributed to our understanding of human adaptation across North America in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. However, poor chronological control has dissuaded similar studies of fluted points found in Alaska and northern Yukon and our understanding of their adaptive role in early arctic adaptations remains unclear. Two new archeological sites have provided reliable radiocarbon data and for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of northern fluted points is possible. Here, technological and morphological analyses of northern fluted points are presented, including variables statistically evaluated and compared to a collection of fluted Folsom artifacts serving as a reference. Variation in tool shape was measured using geometric morphometrics, and a new approach to landmark placement designed to characterize basal morphology and allow the analysis to include tool fragments is presented. Results confirm that northern fluted points represent a cohesive technological strategy and are used to formulate hypotheses suggesting its service as a risk-management system promoting ease-of-replacement-after-failure to offset transport costs and reduce risk during long-distance travel.     

Conceptualizing the Third World: Language, Theory, and Method

Book reviewed in this article:
Pearl L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945     

A Filtered Past: Interpreting Salt Production and Trade Models from Two Remnant Brine-Enrichment Mounds at the Ancient Maya Paynes Creek Salt Works,Belize

The mounds at Witz Naab and Killer Bee are the only known remaining aboveground evidence of a once-thriving salt industry in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a large saltwater system in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Over one hundred ancient Maya salt works dated to the Classic period (a.d. 300–900) have been submerged by sea-level rise in the lagoon. We have hypothesized that mounds were once numerous features on the landscape prior to a sea-level rise that occurred in the area during the Terminal Classic period. Lacking at these underwater sites are earthen mounds formed by discarded soil from the leaching process in which the salinity of seawater was enriched by leaching brine through salty soil. Enriching the salinity of seawater by leaching or by solar evaporation is virtually universal in ethnographic case studies. Data from the excavations are evaluated to interpret the ancient activities that produced the earthen mounds, scales of production, and how the coastal Maya of southern Belize participated in the larger Classic Maya economy.     

A feminist geographic analysis of perceptions of food and health in Ugandan cities

Abstract

This article contributes to a feminist geographic analysis of how urban food and health environments and non-communicable disease experience may be being constructed, and contested, by healthcare professionals (local elites) in two secondary Ugandan cities (Mbale and Mbarara). I use thematic and group interaction analysis of focus group data to explore material and discursive representations. Findings make explicit how healthcare professionals had a tendency to prescribe highly classed and gendered assumptions of bodies and behaviours in places and in daily practices. The work supports the discomfort some have felt concerning claims of an African nutrition transition, and is relevant to debates regarding double burden malnutrition. I argue that a feministic analysis, and an intersectional appreciation of people in places, is advantageous to food and health-related research and policy-making. Results uncover and deconstruct a dominant patriarchal tendency towards blaming women for obesity. Yet findings also exemplify the co-constructed and malleable nature of knowledge and understandings, and this offers encouragement.