REVIEWING CHILD ABUSE POLICY IN AMERICA: A SOCIAL SERVICE APPROACH

For all the recent attention to the problems of child abuse and neglect, this specific policy area has rarely been examined as belonging to the more general area of social service policy. This article begins to remedy this omission. First, the article examines child abuse policy in terms of the conflicts of value faced in the formation of social service policy. Next, the relationship between child abuse and other recent social service issues responding to familial violence or childhood dependency is discussed. Here the article shows that governmental response to child abuse has been used to encourage governmental interest in adoption reform, sexual exploitation of children, domestic violence, and day care.     

Game Resources, Social Interaction, and the Ecological Footprint in Southwest New Mexico

Humans have modified their environments for millennia, but the role of these impacts on economic and social strategies among communities can be difficult to assess. This is due in part to the difficulty of quantifying impacts, which hinders our evaluations of the effects of different resource acquisition strategies and impairs attempts to understand competing demands on resources and their effects on the evolution of social relations. In this paper we employ footprint analysis, a tool used in ecology, to assess the impact of prehistoric subsistence farming communities on the environment, specifically faunal resources. We use footprint analysis to quantify the impact of various strategies of game acquisition by Classic Mimbres period (AD 1000-1130) farmers in the North American Southwest. Assessments are then employed in identifying changes in social relations among communities that may have contributed to settlement changes in the region.     

Understanding Abandonments in the North American Southwest

The North American Southwest is renowned for its rich archaeological record. Thousands of prehistoric houses and ceremonial centers remain partially standing or form mounds that mark prehistoric villages that were once actively occupied and remain important to the descendants. The visibility of archaeological remains has sparked interest in questions of abandonment among archaeologists and the lay public. We explore reasons for this interest, how it is manifest in archaeological research, and how perception of that research influences popular views of the past and of native people. Our focus is on explanations for the causes of site and regional abandonment as well as on explications of the processes by which abandonments occur. Essential to our perspective is the view that abandonment is a process that involves decisions to move, which may be promoted by dire circumstances, but which are most often settlement strategies. The process of moving requires economic, social, and political decisions about the places from which people move and to which they move.     

Carbon isotope measurement techniques for bone collagen: Notes for the archaeologist

Stable carbon isotope analysis of archaeological human bone collagen is becoming increasingly useful in diet reconstructions. This paper describes, for archaeologists, the techniques that we have found useful in carrying out such analyses, and discusses the requirements for measurement accuracy and inter-laboratory calibration.