Toward a Cultural Landscape Atlas: Representing all the Landscape as Cultural

Many government and non‐statutory registers utilise point datasets to represent cultural heritage places. An effect of this approach is to emphasise that cultural heritage comprises a series of spatially discrete material remains or ‘sites’, suggesting discrete locations which are somehow disconnected from their broader historical and landscape contexts. We advocate an alternative in which spatial representation of heritage is set within a cultural landscape framework, acknowledging that all parts of the landscape have inter‐connected cultural histories, associations and meanings resulting from long‐term and ongoing human–environmental interactions. Results from a collaborative cultural heritage research project undertaken at Culgoa National Park in Australia demonstrate the advantage of this approach. The mapping products produced by the work comprise an interactive electronic DVD Atlas and hard copy maps. Both focus on meeting the management needs of field‐based park staff.     

Where is the Caribbean? French Colonial Archaeology in the English Lake

Archaeological investigation of the Caribbean region has generally incorporated unquestioned assumptions about the nature and scale of the context. Most work has been done in the Anglophone Caribbean, and has implicitly taken the English colonial world as the normative context for comparative analysis. This view leaves out a significant portion of the Caribbean colonial world—that of the French imperial program. The French colonial venture in the Caribbean has, until recently, been overlooked by historical archaeology. Recent survey and excavation of sugar, indigo and coffee plantation sites, as well as urban archaeological work, has begun to shed light upon the nature of French colonial life as distinct from that in the Anglophone Caribbean, and also on the ways that the experiences on specific French islands were different from each other. The individual histories of Martinique and Guadeloupe are contrasted in this paper, with reference to the nature of the archaeological record that has been explored, and that remains to be investigated.     

Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias

In this paper, we expand upon a prior study [Surovell, T.A., Brantingham, P.J., 2007. A note on the use of temporal frequency distributions in studies of prehistoric demography. Journal of Archaeological Science 34, 1868–1877.] that explored the problem of taphonomic bias. Taphonomic bias refers to the tendency for younger things to be over-represented relative to older things in the archaeological record due to the operation of destructive processes like erosion and weathering. Using a database of radiocarbon dated volcanic deposits from Bryson, R.U., Bryson, R.A., Ruter, A. [2006. A calibrated radiocarbon database of late Quaternary volcanic eruptions. Earth Discussions 1, 123–124.], we develop an empirical model of taphonomic bias. In contrast to our prior study in which we modeled taphonomic bias as an exponential function wherein the likelihood of site loss remains constant through time, we argue that the probability of site destruction actually decreases with site age. We further demonstrate how this model can be used to correct temporal frequency distributions and extract demographic histories. We illustrate this approach using databases of radiocarbon dates from rockshelter and open-air sites in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA, and mammoths and humans in Siberia, Russia.     

New Directions in Bioarchaeology: Recent Contributions to the Study of Human Social Identities

As a discipline that bridges the biological and social sciences, bioarchaeology has much to contribute to a contextualized and theoretically sophisticated understanding of social identities. Here, we discuss the growing methodological sophistication of bioarchaeology and highlight new developments in osteological age and sex estimation, paleodemography, biodistance analysis, biogeochemistry, and taphonomy, particularly anthropologie de terrain. We then discuss how these methodological developments, when united with social theory, can elucidate social identities. More specifically, we highlight past and future bioarchaeological work on disability and impairment, gender identity, identities of age and the life course, social identity and body modification, embodiment, and ethnic and community identities.