Effect of mollusc eating on human bone strontium levels

Empirical aspects of the movement of strontium through the food chain suggest that the level of bone strontium can be used as an indicator of the percentage of meat in human diet. In general, skeletal remains from agricultural peoples are expected to have high bone strontium levels relative to hunter-gatherers from the same geographical region because plants contain relatively higher amounts of strontium when compared with animal products. The results of the study described in this paper, however, indicate that the inclusion of molluscs as a component of the diet may produce the opposite of the expected strontium values. Burials from an Archaic (c. 2500 BC) hunting-gathering population excavated from Lu^o25, an archaeological site in northern Alabama, USA, exhibit a mean bone strontium level ( atomic absorption; neutron activation) that is higher than the mean level from an agricultural Mississippian (c. AD 1400) population ( atomic absorption; neutron activation) that was buried at the same site. The samples were analysed by two techniques (atomic absorption spectrometry and neutron activation analysis) and the results compared favourably; therefore, the results can be accepted as valid rather than being due to technique error. We propose that the ingestion of molluscs, whose meat is known to contain large amounts of strontium, has produced this reversal from expected results.     

Archaeological Amerindian and Eskimo cranioskeletal size variation along coastal western North America: relation to climate,the reconstructed diet high in marine animal foods,and demographic stress

A quantitative bioenvironmental study of cranioskeletal size has been made of a latitude-ordered sequence of 14 series of adult skeleton sets (N=305): the archaeological remains of aboriginal maritime peoples inhabiting the west coast of North America between southern California and the Arctic. Of eight osteometric parameters of cranioskeletal size developed, the most important are partial skeleton volume (PSK) and cranial capacity (CC); and the principal bone-affecting environmental factors are the northerly climate (CLIM2c), the reconstructed diet deficient in calcium and overabundant in animal foods and vitamin D (DIET3c), and demographic stress (DSg). Prior research has demonstrated that cranioskeletal size increases with geographical latitude and decreases under dietary calcioprivation and unphysiologically high birth rates. Upon linear multifactorial statistical analysis our main finding, limited to the Amerindian subsequence (n=11 series) from the Santa Barbara Channel, the San Francisco Bay Region and the Northwest Coast, is that PSK and CC vary in direct proportion to CLIM2c, and inversely with DIET3c and DSg. Controlling for the latter two osteoantitrophic factors, coastal Amerindian female PSK rises by 9% between 34 and 54°N latitude, CC by 5%; and the male incremental rates are somewhat higher, 13 and 10%, respectively. This newly discovered climate-dependent race cline, an example of Bergmann's Rule, is interpreted as factual evidence of a mid-Wisconsin or earlier arrival date for the first Palaeoindians. Cranioskeletal size of the very small (n=3 series) Western Eskimo subsequence approximates the northernmost values of the coastal Amerindian distribution. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Found in translation

This review considers new work on translation, cultural interpretation, and cross-cultural comparison, all three terms suggesting different but related approaches to the central problem of sociocultural anthropology, that of understanding human meaning-making. Translating Worlds brings together ten authors who take language translation as a paradigmatic example of cultural translation within and across different kinds of linguistic and social boundaries. The Chimera Principle is a historically and ethnographically grounded study of Amerindian pictographies, focusing on cultural translation across media and on the uses of different media in ritual.     

John Locke on Native Right,Colonial Possession,and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium

The early paragraphs of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) describe a poetic idyll of property acquisition widely supposed by contemporary theorists and historians to have cast the template for imperial possessions in the New World. This reading ignores the surprises lurking in Locke’s later chapters on conquest, usurpation, and tyranny, where he affirms that native rights to lands and possessions survive to succeeding generations. Locke warned his readers that this “will seem a strange doctrine, it being quite contrary to the practice of the world.” His doctrine of native right is equally strange to recent scholars who see in Lockean theory the ideological prototype for England’s colonial expropriation in the “vacant lands” of North America. This interpretation, dignified by the elusive principle of vacuum domicilium, is considerably weakened when Locke’s arguments are placed in the historical context of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English colonial experience. Locke’s Second Treatise, with its literary flourish of a vast and idyllic state of nature, was written in the full appreciation of Amerindian agriculture, its established populations, the acknowledgement of native property rights, and the policy and practice of purchasing land from the native inhabitants.     

Cabot Explorations in North America

Abstract

The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernán Cortés's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua‐Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a symbolic function in supporting Cortés's (and thereby Spain's) just conquest of the Amerindian empire.