Eugenics as Indian removal: sociohistorical processes and the de(con)struction of American Indians in the southeast

Although research on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States is legion, its impact on state policies that identified and defined American Indians has yet to be fully addressed. The exhibit, Our Lives: Comtemporary Life and Identities (ongoing until September 21, 2014) at the National Museum of the American Indian provides a provocative vehicle for examining how eugenics-informed public policy during the first quarter of the twentieth century served to "remove" from official records Native peoples throughout the Southeast. One century after Indian Removal of the antebellum era, Native peoples in the American Southeast provide an important but often overlooked example of how racial policies, this time rooted in eugenics, effected a documentary erasure of Native peoples and communities.     

Reconstructing the Politics of Indigenous Identity in Chile

Current research questions how archaeology has reconstructed social identities based on material culture and ethnic groups. Recently, some Native populations from the Tarapacá region, Northern Chile, have claimed their indigenous rights and recognition as Andean First Nations. Using existing laws and programs developed by the Chilean government, they have redefined themselves as organised local communities. Their claims question archaeological practice in the production and reproduction of scientific knowledge, and its social repercussions in the property of land, water and cultural heritage. Within the Latin American social context, archaeology sometimes has avoided playing a political role, consequently conceding certain histories above others. As a social science, the discipline needs to evaluate its impact on archaeologically based identities which are sometimes politically alienated, modified, and appropriated to create new representations of the past legitimised in present time. This paper furthers a discussion of the politics of identity by focusing on the Chilean Aymara case and the legitimacy of its appropriation strategies.     

Influence of grinding on the preservation of starch grains from rice

China is a major centre for rice domestication, where starch grain analysis has been widely applied to archaeological grinding tools to gain information about plant use by ancient Chinese societies. However, few rice starch grains have been identified to date. To understand this apparent scarcity of starch grains from rice, dry- and wet-grinding experiments with stone tools were carried out on four types of cereals: rice (Oryza sativa L.), foxtail millet (Setaria italica), Job's tears (Coix lacryma-jobi L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). The results reveal that dry-grinding produces significant damage to starches to the point where they may be undetected in archaeological samples, while wet-grinding causes only slight morphological changes to the starch grains. Moreover, rice starch grains have the most substantial alterations from dry-grinding, possibly impeding their identification. These findings provide a possible means to explain the relative scarcity of rice starch grains recovered from archaeological grinding tools, which it is suggested was caused by the use of the dry-grinding technique. Therefore, it is suggested that rice starch grains have been likely underrepresented in the archaeological record, and previous interpretations of starch analyses need to be reconsidered.     

Microanalytical study of copper ores from the Chalcolithic settlement of São Pedro (Portugal): Copper production in the south-western Iberian Peninsula

Copper ores recovered at the third millennium bce settlement of São Pedro, Portugal, were characterized by micro-Raman spectroscopy, micro-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (micro-EDXRF) and micro-particle-induced X-ray emission spectrometry (micro-PIXE). The collection shows the common presence of secondary copper minerals (malachite, pseudomalachite and libethenite) combined with iron oxyhydroxides (hematite and goethite), while arsenic-rich minerals are absent and, therefore, can be excluded as the source of arsenical copper. Overall, these copper ores suggest a primitive technology involving the exploitation of the superficial zone of ore bodies and reliant on the fortuitous finding of arsenic-rich sources to produce the arsenical copper alloy frequently present among metallic collections of the Iberian Peninsula.