A probable case of metastatic carcinoma from the late prehistoric eastern Tennessee River Valley

There are few described cases of metastatic carcinoma from the prehistoric eastern United States and none primarily differentially diagnosed from the southeast. A mature adult female exhibiting several large lytic cranial lesions suggestive of neoplastic disease was identified in a late prehistoric Mississippian Period (AD 1200–1600) context. Burial 371 is from Ledford Island, a Mouse Creek phase (AD 1400–1500) site from the Chickamauga Reservoir of southeastern Tennessee. It is the only case in this reservoir (total adult n = 843). The radiographs of the otherwise asymptomatic postcranium yielded radiolucencies in both proximal femora, both medial clavicles, the sternum, the surviving humeral metaphysis and fragmentary innominate. The locations are all consistent with metastasized carcinoma. The identity of the possible primary lesion is argumentative. Age, sex and the mixed nature of the osseous response are consistent with carcinoma of the breast but not to the exclusion of bronchogenic, thyroid, or kidney cancers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Land reform in the 1950s in Italy and the United States: the thinking of Mario Einaudi

The article discusses the thinking of Mario Einaudi in relation to the ambitious measures with which the Italian government sought to move towards land reform in the immediate post–war period. Einaudi, an intellectual and academic, was by birth Italian but moved to the United States during the Fascist period. Like his father Luigi, the noted economist, he was convinced of the need to stimulate the free market in land in order to increase productivity and modernise cultivation methods; in his writings he repeatedly sought to develop a plan of action that would facilitate collaboration between Rome and Washington in this field, identifying the Tennessee Valley Authority approach as especially suited to the Italian case. However, while his ideas achieved a good public airing, they had a limited impact: on the political front, Cold War priorities pushed Italian and US Marshall Plan experts more towards the redistribution of landownership than towards stimulating the productivity of agricultural businesses, in the attempt to rapidly build a consensus behind the government; and on the cultural front, at the end of the 1950s the issue of backwardness in the rural South started to be interpreted in terms of cultural and social anthropology, an approach which did not directly relate to the development of political programmes.     

Temporal trends in violence during the Mississippian period in the Middle Cumberland Region of Tennessee

This study utilizes a biocultural approach to investigate skeletal evidence for violence among Mississippian communities in the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee. Bioarchaeological evidence for violence is placed within the local environmental and cultural context in order to better understand temporal trends in regional conflict. Bioarchaeological analyses were conducted on the crania of 599 adult individuals from 13 sites in the MCR. Approximately 7.2 percent of the sample (43/599) showed evidence of violent cranial injuries in the form of scalping, sharp force trauma, and blunt force trauma. While overall trauma frequencies appear to increase during the later Mississippian period, this may reflect a shift in the nature of violence, rather than simply an intensification of intergroup conflict. More fine-grained temporal comparisons are made for samples from the late Mississippian Averbuch site. The variability in the frequencies and types of violence observed within the MCR demonstrates the issues inherent in the reliance on broad generalizations about human behavior in the past and highlights the importance of utilizing both a regional and diachronic approach.     

The Removal of Ear Trophies Associated with Scalpings in Prehistoric North Alabama

The act of scalping has long been associated with Native American conflict‐related human body part trophy taking. Reasons for their removal were varied and often included communal and personal factors. Previous research has identified several different types of scalp removals based on the amount of soft tissue affected during the process of scalping. One of these types can involve the removal of the ears. Through reanalysis of known scalping victims within the middle Tennessee Valley of North Alabama, we have identified five cases where victims were both scalped and had their ears removed. These cases provide a unique understanding of the practice of human body part trophy taking. They support ethnographic accounts that indicate ear removal has great time depth and was geographically widespread. Although the five cases presented here are similar to total compound scalpings, they actually represent total simple scalpings. Unlike total compound scalpings, where the ears are removed attached to the skin of the scalp, these cases show evidence of secondary removal of the ears after the scalp was already detached. This secondary removal of the ears after the act of scalping supports the interpretation that the aggressors intended different purposes for each trophy. It is likely that the scalp and ears each had their own meaning. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Parry’ fractures and female-directed interpersonal violence: Implications from the Late Archaic Period of west Tennessee

The recognition of a high frequency of ‘parry’ fractures in the females from the Late Archaic Period (2500–1000/500 BC ) west Tennessee site of Eva prompted a more thorough examination of female-directed interpersonal violence in prehistoric Tennessee sites. The study examined forearm fractures in eight (N = 308) Late Archaic Period hunter-gatherer sites and five (N = 501) Mississippian Period (c. AD 1200–1600) agriculturalist sites. On the basis of chi-square test results, there does not appear to be any gender bias in forearm fracture occurrence in the Archaic Period. The high frequency of female ‘parry’ fractures at Eva was an artefact of the ratio of females to males. More importantly, craniofacial trauma data do not support an aetiology that would explain mid-shaft forearm fractures as a result of interpersonal violence.     

Non-destructive provenance study of chert using infrared reflectance microspectroscopy

In this paper we explore the potential of non-destructive Infrared reflectance microspectroscopy (IRRMS) for the characterization of chert samples from 10 different geological outcrops in North America with emphasis on the Midcontinent. A principle objective of the project is to determine whether IRRMS analysis can provide a mineral-based signature for bedrock sources of chert artifacts. The technique utilizes a Bio-Rad Digilab FTS-40 Infrared spectroscope and microscope attachment that reflects an infrared beam off a chert specimen. Our findings indicate that spectral features from the molecules constituting minor and trace minerals in chert may provide sufficient characterization for chert sourcing.     

Subsistence and Settlement Correlates of Treponemal Disease: Temporal Patterns in Pre‐Columbian East Tennessee

After ca 1000 BC , coinciding with the transition to sedentism, tertiary stage treponemal disease apparently becomes osteologically pervasive in pre‐Columbian North America. However, varying interobserver treponemal disease diagnostic thresholds, sampling error and the possibly ecosensitive nature of the pre‐Columbian nonvenereal treponemal disease variants (i.e. yaws and treponarid) prevents subsistence‐settlement pattern from becoming a reliable predictor of treponemal disease prevalence. This is particularly true of later prehistory with the transition from horticulture to intensive, maize‐based agriculture. To address whether treponemal disease visibility does vary across this specific subsistence‐settlement threshold, subadults (4+ years of age) and adults from 11 late prehistoric sites (N = 997) from the same geographic area of East Tennessee were sampled for the presence of treponemal disease. Six sites (N = 279) primarily date to the Late Woodland period (AD 700–900) and culturally belong to what is referred to as the Hamilton mortuary complex. The sample is archaeologically characterised as horticulturalist with presumably a dispersed farmstead or hamlet settlement pattern. Six sites (N = 718) date to the Late Mississippian (AD 1300–1550, Dallas phase) and are maize‐intensive agriculturalists with a large, aggregate village settlement pattern. The sites were examined using three different levels of treponemal disease diagnostic confidence. Treponemal disease raw frequency does indeed differ across the levels of diagnostic confidence between the total Late Woodland horticulturalist sample (4.3–5.5%) and total Late Mississippian maize agriculturalist sample (5.4–6.5%). The meaning is complex as the Dallas phase sample may have a socially segregated elite; the mound‐interred (1.8%) relative to the village‐interred (6.1–7.4%) exhibited significantly fewer cases of treponemal disease. Tentatively, treponemal disease visibility does appear to co‐associate with sedentism and perhaps (if the mound‐interred Dallas individuals are elites) also aggregated settlement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Food production in the Early Woodland: macrobotanical remains as evidence for farming along the riverbank in eastern Tennessee

ABSTRACT

Open riverbanks and disturbed floodplains are targeted by archaeologists as optimal habitats for the growth of many of the weedy indigenous seed crops in eastern North America, but there is still little evidence for garden locations in the archaeological record. This article combines macrobotanical and geoarchaeological analyses from the Birdwell site (40GN228), located on the Nolichucky River, to give insight into where cultigens were planted and how they were managed in eastern Tennessee during the Early Woodland period. The recovery of uncharacteristic amounts of edible seeds and wood charcoal from the lower terrace of this site suggests that inhabitants were actively managing cultigens along the floodplain of this settlement. The presence of these remains in a non-midden context is evidence that precontact farmers in the Tennessee foothills took advantage of the newly created floodplains of the Early Woodland by implementing a burning regime, an early agricultural strategy aimed at increasing soil productivity and encouraging the growth of weedy annuals on the riverbank. In absence of lines of evidence such as preserved paleosols that can be examined for soil micromorphology, pollen, and phytoliths, integrated paleoethnobotanical and geomorphological analyses can be used to reconstruct land use and archaeologically identify prehistoric cultivated fields.