Toward a Geography of American Civil Religion

The concept of civil religion has been of considerable interest to students of American culture during recent decades. Little attention has been given, however, to regional variations in the practice of American civil religion. The purpose of this study is to explore basic patterns in the popular observance of the Bicentennial, as one possible approach to understanding the geography of American civil religion. The study is based on the register of Bicentennial events compiled by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration during 1975 and 1976. Findings indicate that the strongest commitment to public celebration of the Bicentennial occurred in a large region reaching from the western prairie states across the Great Plains into the northern Rocky Mountains. This commitment was expressed both in the region's large number of Bicentennial events and in the distinctively celebrative quality of many of those events. Civil religion's prominence in this region probably reflects several factors: the importance of religion generally in providing a sense of community in a region characterized by cultural isolation; the effect of rural and small-town conformity and the influence of a regional culture that is closely tied to the traditional mainstream of American culture.     

The logic of the herd: A computer simulation of archaeological herd structure

The advent of new techniques of dental ageing has permitted inferences about the age-structures of ancient animal populations on the basis of faunal remains. Unfortunately, inference from archaeological populations of faunal elements to the age-structure of ancient herds is fraught with both sampling problems and logical difficulties. The relationship between a living herd—a dynamic system characterized by growth—and a static archaeological population is more complex than that assumed by current models based on kill-off patterns and survivorship curves. Using a computer simulation, these logical relationships are explored, and the effects of herd growth on the composition of live and death populations are evaluated. By employing the simulation within a deductive framework, constrained by ethnographically derived criteria for reproduction, mortality, and economic viability in the Near East, it is possible to determine whether certain archaeological kill-off patterns could represent viable herding systems. Examples were found to vary widely in terms of both demographic plausibility and economic viability. Some implications for the possible course of ova-caprine domestication in the Near East are discussed.