Assessment of the Southern Dispersal: GIS-Based Analyses of Potential Routes at Oxygen Isotopic Stage 4

This paper explores the geographic and environmental context of the Southern Dispersal Route, which has been proposed as a migratory route for Homo sapiens from East Africa to Australasia during oxygen isotope stage (OIS) 4 (71–59 kyr). A series of assumptions and constraints garnered from modern hunter-gatherer observations are used to build a model of coastal foragers, which is then integrated with high-resolution physiographic analyses to produce a potential dispersal route along the coastline of the Indian Ocean. Paleoenvironmental conditions that may have supplied critical resources or served as obstacles to human colonization are identified and discussed in regards to human subsistence, the speed of migration, and demographic expansion. These factors suggest that rapid dispersals along coastlines and river valleys would have occurred upon the initial expansion out of Africa, but slowed as populations expanded demographically into South Asia and the Sunda Shelf. This also suggests that archaeological signatures relating to the earliest modern Homo sapiens are more likely to be recovered in South Asia.     

Archaeology in Antarctica: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism Expansion Strategies

Antarctica was the last continent to be discovered in the early nineteenth century. In order to become acquainted with the process of incorporation of Antarctica to the scope of the capitalist system we have focused on particularity: i.e., specific economic and technological and ideological aspects of everyday life in sealer camps spread along the coastline of the South Shetland Islands. Archaeological research in Byers Peninsula–Livingston Island provides an approach to the mechanisms implemented to organize the first resource exploitation in these lands.     

The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery

The Gibbs farmstead, a rural domestic site in Knox County, East Tennessee, was inhabited by four generations of the Nicholas Gibbs family between ca. 1792 and 1913. In the following essay, world systems theory is combined with primary historical sources and the archaeological record to explore how aspects of the emerging global system influenced daily material life and household-level economic strategies among the Gibbs family in Southern Appalachia, regarded as an internal periphery within the world system. Focusing upon domestic architecture and foodways, consideration of material life reveals the presence of a strong vernacular orientation among the Gibbs family that was also substantially influenced by larger trends within national-level consumerism and popular culture.     

Re-Inventing Mississippian Tradition at Etowah,Georgia

Frequent population movement and political re-organization spurred a pattern of repeated abandonment at the Mississippian mound center of Etowah in the southeastern United States. These processes also characterized the larger surrounding region in north Georgia and southeast Tennessee. The Etowah abandonments provided inflection points where interest groups were able to distance themselves from previous conventions of structure and reformulate new forms of sociopolitical organization. Re-invented traditions were embedded in changing definitions of genealogical and mythical time, and mediated through the built environment and iconography.     

Being Toured While Digging Tourism: Excavating the Familiar at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

Chicago’s Jackson Park witnessed intense and sustained tourism during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Recent archaeological survey and excavation produced information about the tourist experience of the Fair in a somewhat familiar artifactural form. The dig drew local tourists whose appetites for the Exposition were whetted by a bestselling book. At the heart of these multiple touristic consumptions in, and of, Jackson Park lies the central issue—the way that tourists create themselves as modern subjects through the practice of tourism and how this process can be both helped and hindered by the presence of familiar objects.     

The Poverty Trap: Or,Why Poverty is Not About the Individual

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be placed upon the perceived failings of individuals and more effort should be placed on recovering the complex social networks which sustained community-life within Hungate and other so-called urban slums.