Hunter-gatherer adaptations and assemblage structure

There is a growing tendency to conceive of hunter-gatherer adaptations as points on a yardstick, with foragers at one end and collectors on the other. Such a view limits our perspective and may trap anthropologists into seeing these categories as steps in an evolutionary progression. It is more productive to think of human adaptation as an N-dimensional space, with individual cases occurring at the intersections of the various dimensions. When this viewpoint is taken, it becomes clear that a search for a single dimension in archaeological data that can be used to characterize all prehistoric adaptations is unlikely to be fruitful. This paper explores the multidimensionality of hunter-gatherer adaptive behavior and reviews those archaeological manifestations that are empirically or logically linked with various dimensions of three components of adaptation: mobility, predation, and technology. Those manifestations with the greatest potential for characterizing prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies are identified as measures of mobility type, frequency, stability, scheduling, demography, and range; predation mode, breadth, and scheduling; and the time budgeting and storage dimensions of technology. A subset of these measures is evaluated by comparing assemblages from the late prehistoric Columbia Plateau with expectations derived from ethnographies written on the same local area.     

Elimination of Source A and B Errors in p-Median Location Problems

The p-median problem is a powerful tool in analyzing facility location options when the goal of the location scheme is to minimize the average distance that demand must traverse to reach its nearest facility. It may be used to determine the number of facilities to site, as well as the actual facility locations. Demand data are frequently aggregated in p-median location problems to reduce the computational complexity of the problem. Demand data aggregation, however, results in the loss of locational information. This loss may lead to suboptimal facility location configurations (optimality errors) and inaccurate measures of the resulting travel distances (cost errors). Hillsman and Rhoda (1978) have identified three error components: Source A, B, and C errors, which may result from demand data aggregation. In this article, a method to measure weighted travel distances in p-median problems which eliminates Source A and B errors is proposed. Test problem results indicate that the proposed measurement scheme yields solutions with lower optimality and cost errors than does the traditional distance measurement scheme.     

PREHISTORIC FLINT MINES AND THEIR IDENTIFICATION AS SOURCES OF RAW MATERIAL

This paper is a statistical and geological study of the results of analysis of flint from British and West European flint mines, carried out by emission and atomic absorption spectroscopy. Groups of flint specimens were studied from each geographically separate flint mining area. Flints were analysed for a group of easily measured trace elements shown by previous work to be generally present. The ratios between the trace elements form a consistent pattern for each flint mine and statistically valid differences of pattern can be recognized between different flint mines. A geological investigation shows that the measured trace elements may be derived from clay minerals and explains geographical and statistical variation in the composition of flint in terms of its mode of origin in the chalk. An advanced statistical technique allows individual flint specimens of unknown origin to be attributed by their composition to one or other of the identified flint sources. The archaeological implications of this study are discussed.     

Reviews of books

Historical Archaeology -