The dental arcade and human morphology

Cranio-dental fossils are relatively common in the fossil record and this paper considers the question of whether the dental arcade can act as a predictor of hominid morphology. A method of measuring the catenary number of an arcade is also described and defined. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Foreclosure Risk and Community Health: Does Social Capital Have a Protective Effect?

This study draws upon the social determinants of health framework to model and test the extent to which a community’s social capital is health protective in the face of a substantial economic shock, namely the recent foreclosure crisis. U.S. county–level data are used to analyze potential moderating effects of social capital on health given a community’s foreclosure risk. We rely upon established social capital measures for U.S counties and merge them with county level foreclosure risk scores constructed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). While theorists suggest that social capital’s effect on health and other outcomes may be durable over time there have been few empirical tests of this. We interact established social capital indicators measured at two points in time with foreclosure risk to predict overall self-reported health. Our results provide strong support suggesting that high levels of social capital are health protective. Communities with high levels of social capital that are facing high foreclosure risks report significantly better aggregate health outcomes than comparable communities facing the same level of foreclosure risk, but lower levels of social capital.     

Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History

Melissa Walker, an associate professor of history at ConverseCollege, author of All We Knew Was To Farm: Rural Women in theUpcountry South, 1919–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2000), winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prizefrom the Southern Association for Women Historians, presentsan intellectual tour de force in Southern Farmers and TheirStories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History, part of the NewDirections in Southern History Series from the University ofKentucky     

Changes in starch grain morphologies from cooking

One of the three main plant microfossils, starch grains are increasingly used as markers of diet, plant domestication, tool use and site organization, because their morphology and features provide a means to identify the plant that produced them. However, starch grains are susceptible to damage when they are exposed to heat in the presence of water, as in cooking. We documented the changes that occur in the starch grains of 10 domesticated plant species due to exposure to different cooking methods, in order to better understand how cooking alters the appearance of the grains, and if these cooking methods might be identifiable in the archaeological record. Our results show that some cooking methods produce unique, identifiable damage on some types of plant starches, but generally each plant species reacts uniquely to cooking. In order to record the changes for each plant species, we have created a database, available at (http://www.osresearch.net/∼hollyf/starchdb/index.cgi), to which registered users can add their own images of cooked starch grains.     

A historiography of an ahistoricity: on the beothuk indians

The Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland have long been perceived as a cultural anachronism in the native history of northeastern North America. They appeared to represent cultural holdovers from some earlier age that had been preserved in a primitive state due to isolation on a cold North Atlantic isle. To many, their history seemed shallow, timeless even. Those that supported this position did so by drawing on four lines of evidence. They interpreted Beothuk material culture and other cultural “traits” as indicative of an archaic state; they cited the Beothuk's place of residence‐a northern island‐as evidence of isolation from other peoples and the march of time; they cited linguistic differences as further evidence of isolation; and finally, the fact that the Beothuk became extinct seemed to offer proof that these people had indeed belonged to another age, incapable of making the leap from prehistory to the modern era. This article explores this evidence and attempts to understand the “logic” or rationale by which scholars come to view the Beothuk and their history as timeless.     

Pencils and Pixels: Drawing and Digital Media in Archaeological Field Recording

Within the context of a growing emphasis on digital recording, what is the place of analog drawing in archaeological fieldwork? In this article, we situate the increased application of digital drawing methods by providing several historical examples of archaeological field drawing in British archaeology to demonstrate the connection between understanding the archaeological record and illustration. Given this background of analog archaeological recording, we then explore the current state of archaeological field drawing and the affordances of digital illustration for recording and interpreting the archaeological record, review literature in architecture and design regarding the cognitive function of analog and digital drawing, and discuss the possible future implications of born-digital or paperless archaeology.