What Explains the Carcass Field Processing and Transport Decisions of Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers? Measures of Economic Anatomy and Zooarchaeological Skeletal Part Representation

This paper uses rationale derived from central place foraging models to explore the factors that guide the carcass processing and transport decisions of modern hunters. Using data derived from butchering experiments, I test different economic indices that purportedly reflect the field processing and transport decisions of contemporary African Hadza hunter-gatherers. The results show that no single index predicts part processing and transport for the species examined in this analysis. Processing and transport decisions are, however, patterned in ways that are consistent with theoretical predictions. While similar processes likely guide carcass treatment and transport decisions among all hunter-gatherers, different ecological, social, and historical constraints define the range of solutions to problems involving carcass treatment. In this specific example, intertaxonomic differences in carcass size and bone properties constrain how the trade-offs between field processing and transport costs are resolved. I conclude by suggesting ways in which analysts might make use of central place foraging rationale and models to explain variation in skeletal representation and abundances across time and space.

Lower Pecos and Coahuila peyote: new radiocarbon dates

Peyote, a psychoactive cactus native to the Chihuahuan Desert, has been preserved from excavations at only two archaeological sites: Shumla Caves in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas and shelter CM-79 near Cuatro Ciénegas in Coahuila, Mexico. We determined three indistinguishable radiocarbon ages of 5160 ± 45, 5200 ± 35, and 5210 ± 35 ¹⁴C years BP, yielding a mean age of 5195 ± 20 ¹⁴C years BP for the three specimens from Shumla Caves. For one of the Cuatro Ciénegas specimens we obtained the first direct radiocarbon date of 835 ± 35 ¹⁴C years BP. This study demonstrates the use of peyote by inhabitants of the Lower Pecos region of the Chihuahuan Desert about 6000 calendar years ago, and confirms its use by inhabitants of the Cuatro Ciénegas region of the Chihuahuan Desert in Late Prehistoric times. The Shumla Caves' specimens are composed of an aggregate of ground peyote mixed with other plant material, i.e., they appear to be manufactured peyote effigies, and are definitely not intact peyote buttons.     

The substance of sexual difference: change and persistence in representations of the body in eighteenth-century England

The claims of Thomas Laqueur for a shift from a one-sex to a two-sex model of sexual difference are incorporated into many recent histories of gender in England between 1650 and 1850. Yet the Laqueurian narrative is not supported by discussions of the substance of sexual difference in eighteenth-century erotic books. This article argues that different models of sexual difference were not mutually exclusive and did not change in linear fashion, but that the themes of sameness and difference were strategically deployed in the same period. Thus, there was an enduring synchronic diversity which undermines claims for linear transformation.     

CORE ELEMENTS AND LAYOUT CLASSES IN SWIFT CREEK PADDLE ART

Our work here extends a study in which we identified a set of task models used by early Swift Creek artisans to produce paddle designs. Reconstructed procedures for early bandwork compositions highlighted the importance of the placement of guide points and guidelines to the final product as well as the hierarchal nature of the production sequence, leading to the realization that designs can be profitably classified by the geometry of these initial steps. In this paper, we examine two layout classes defined from observations across some of the more common core elements in the Swift Creek design corpus. We then seriate the most common of the core elements, the Omega, by virtue of variation in its visual characteristics. We draw on the stratigraphic sequence at Fairchild’s Landing (9SE14), Seminole County, Georgia, as a test of the core-element seriation and discuss developmental differences in the Omega between two prolific Swift Creek regions, the lower Chattahoochee River of southwestern Georgia and southeastern Alabama and the lower Ocmulgee and upper Satilla rivers of central and south-central Georgia, on the other.