1,721,041 research outputs found
Stone artefacts and human ecology at two rockshelters in Northwest Thailand
No full textThis thesis documents the interaction of stone artefact technology and local environmental contexts during the late Pleistocene and Holocene at two rockshelters in the uplands of northwest Thailand. Previous work has been divided over the importance of environmental influences in human forager technology in mainland Southeast Asia. It has also been limited by the use of typological methods that are poorly suited to the flaked stone artefact technology of the region. Typological methods have not performed well because of the paucity of formal types in these assemblages. This has left a gap in our understanding of prehistoric human- environment relations. Advances in archaeology and human behavioural ecology have allowed for a more robust articulation between archaeological evidence and behaviours relating to environmental change. Three general models were developed from optimal foraging theory: a patch choice model, a central place model and an optimal dispersion model.
Developments in stone artefact analysis have produced reliable links between specific technological attributes of artefacts, behaviours relating to technological organisation and strategies of risk management. These advances were applied here to explore different dimensions of technological organisation by investigating the three foraging models. An experiment was conducted to test which variables are most indicative of risk reduction at the assemblage level for flaked stone artefacts in mainland Southeast Asia. These variables were then recorded from stone artefacts recovered from archaeological deposits at Ban Rai Rockshelter and Tham Lod Rockshelter. Although relatively close to each other, there are stark contrasts in the local availability of resources at these two sites because of the rugged landscape. These contrasts were used to refine the three models and produce synchronic hypotheses to test with the stone artefacts. A palaeoecological record was constructed by analyzing oxygen and carbon isotopes in freshwater bivalves recovered from the two sites. This allowed for further refinement of the three models and production of diachronic hypotheses about the relationship between stone artefact technological organisation and environmental change.
The result of the hypothesis testing suggested that people were simultaneously optimising their response to climatic conditions and local resource availability, but in a way that was not consistently predicted by the existing models. This inconsistency was resolved by introducing a model of risk management and stone artefact reduction that includes a point of inflection so that environmental constraints can result in more than one optimum strategy. This work has vindicated previous claims that mainland Southeast Asian foragers were sensitive to environmental changes, especially over the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. This work has found no support for previous claims that Pleistocene technologies were flake-based while Holocene industries were cobble- based. The results have important implications for understanding mainland Southeast Asian prehistory, including introducing of a suite of effective methods and techniques for human palaeoecology and stone artefact analysis, identifying potential causes and probable timing of technological and subsistence changes throughout the region as well as demonstrating the resilience and vulnerability of human groups to environmental variability
Stone artefacts and human ecology at two rockshelters in Northwest Thailand
No full textThis thesis documents the interaction of stone artefact technology and local environmental contexts during the late Pleistocene and Holocene at two rockshelters in the uplands of northwest Thailand. Previous work has been divided over the importance of environmental influences in human forager technology in mainland Southeast Asia. It has also been limited by the use of typological methods that are poorly suited to the flaked stone artefact technology of the region. Typological methods have not performed well because of the paucity of formal types in these assemblages. This has left a gap in our understanding of prehistoric human- environment relations. Advances in archaeology and human behavioural ecology have allowed for a more robust articulation between archaeological evidence and behaviours relating to environmental change. Three general models were developed from optimal foraging theory: a patch choice model, a central place model and an optimal dispersion model.
Developments in stone artefact analysis have produced reliable links between specific technological attributes of artefacts, behaviours relating to technological organisation and strategies of risk management. These advances were applied here to explore different dimensions of technological organisation by investigating the three foraging models. An experiment was conducted to test which variables are most indicative of risk reduction at the assemblage level for flaked stone artefacts in mainland Southeast Asia. These variables were then recorded from stone artefacts recovered from archaeological deposits at Ban Rai Rockshelter and Tham Lod Rockshelter. Although relatively close to each other, there are stark contrasts in the local availability of resources at these two sites because of the rugged landscape. These contrasts were used to refine the three models and produce synchronic hypotheses to test with the stone artefacts. A palaeoecological record was constructed by analyzing oxygen and carbon isotopes in freshwater bivalves recovered from the two sites. This allowed for further refinement of the three models and production of diachronic hypotheses about the relationship between stone artefact technological organisation and environmental change.
The result of the hypothesis testing suggested that people were simultaneously optimising their response to climatic conditions and local resource availability, but in a way that was not consistently predicted by the existing models. This inconsistency was resolved by introducing a model of risk management and stone artefact reduction that includes a point of inflection so that environmental constraints can result in more than one optimum strategy. This work has vindicated previous claims that mainland Southeast Asian foragers were sensitive to environmental changes, especially over the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. This work has found no support for previous claims that Pleistocene technologies were flake-based while Holocene industries were cobble- based. The results have important implications for understanding mainland Southeast Asian prehistory, including introducing of a suite of effective methods and techniques for human palaeoecology and stone artefact analysis, identifying potential causes and probable timing of technological and subsistence changes throughout the region as well as demonstrating the resilience and vulnerability of human groups to environmental variability
Measuring Cultural Transmission at Archaeological Scales: How Can We Improve Empirical Sufficiency?
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020Cultural transmission has long been a key organizing principle within anthropology, but the effort to formalize cultural transmission models and fit them to archaeological data is more recent, stimulated by work by Robert Dunnell in the 1970's. Since then, the use of cultural transmission modeling in archaeology has branched into several research programs: one macroevolutionary, employing phylogenetic methods; and one microevolutionary, employing models derived from population genetics. A third research program, focused on intermediate or "mesoscopic" scales and seriation as a finer-grained counterpart to phylogenetic and cladistics, is being developed by Carl Lipo and the present author. This dissertation collects research papers by the author since 2012 which examine two questions. First, are equifinality issues encountered in the microevolutionary research program solvable or do they prevent us from employing individual-scale models? Second, to the extent that equifinality cannot be circumvented, can we construct better approaches at the mesosopic scale appropriate to coarse grained, time averaged data? Two papers examine the first question, using simulation modeling and statistical methods to test whether theoretical models can be distinguished even in principle. The first paper examines the effects of temporal aggregation, which is ubiquitous in the archaeological record, on our ability to distinguish between cultural transmission models, and finds significant issues in doing so with time averaged data. The second paper examines the effects of population heterogeneity in social learning modes, which is well documented from living human and animal populations. I find that heterogeneous mixtures of social learning rules can be identified statistically, but only with synchronic censusing of the population, and that time averaging and small samples render mixtures indistinguishable from pure unbiased copying. Turning to the second question, three papers continue my long-term research into reshaping the classical seriation method into a tool for tracing the structure of cultural transmision at regional scales. One short paper examines the combinatorial structure of the seriation problem when we admit multiple subsolutions. A second paper seeks to increase the size of possible seriations, which is necessary to incorporate significant spatial variation and yield a tool usable for investigating the history of cultural transmission in a region. We increase the potential size of seriation solutions by switching from unimodality to distance minimization as the ordering criterion, yielding "continuity'' seriation as a distinct method. A third paper in this group then applies continuity seriation graphs as the observable variable, in a methodological study of how to construct models of how cultural transmission was structured at the regional scale. This paper introduces ``interval temporal networks'' as a way to formalize our hypotheses about regional interaction and transmission, and explores a statistical method for summarizing the topology of seriation graphs, to assess their fit to our regional interaction models. A final paper examines a different kind of mesoscale question: how do we begin to model not just the spatiotemporal structure of past cultural transmission, but its \emph{content} as well. The chapter models the dependency structure of the knowledge required to construct complex artifact types, through the "prerequisites'' needed for each step, and introduces a model where transmission of subsequent traits requires learning their prerequisites first. This simplified model of ``structured'' cultural traits is then used to explore the "learning hypothesis" for behavioral modernity, by looking at the richness and depth of knowledge gained when transmission is mostly accomplished by simple imitation compared to learning via a teacher. The results are suggestive that the learning hypothesis can account for the increased richness of ``behaviorally modern'' hominids, and more importantly, points the way to more substantive and technologically informed cultural transmission models
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Multiple Optima in Hoabinhian flaked stone artefact palaeoeconomics and palaeoecology at two archaeological sites in Northwest Thailand
No full textAbstractHigh resolution analyses of flaked stone artefact technology coupled with palaeoecological reconstruction from oxygen isotope analyses of freshwater shells from two rockshelter in the highlands of Northwest Thailand are described. Previously undocumented scales of technological variation are observed in response to environmental variation across the prehistoric landscape and through time. Three models of human behavioural ecology are used to test predictions about how foragers adapted their stone artefact technology to variation in climatic conditions and proximity to stone resources. These models are found to be problematic and are modified by including multiple optima that reflect the specific ecological conditions under consideration
Archaeological Evidence of Change in Social Organization at Kiwulan, an Iron Age site in Northeastern Taiwan, during European Colonization
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021Colonial encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people have long been an important topic in historical archaeology as scholars seek to explore their effects on Indigenous social, cultural, and material worlds. However, our current understanding heavily relies on studies of European colonies with obvious evidence of direct colonial rule, which provides limited insights into the reactions of Indigenous societies at the periphery of European colonial centers. In those places, Indigenous societies may face a relatively weak or indirect colonial power. Despite the colonization of Taiwan by Europeans from 1624 to 1662, little is known from the archaeological record about the nature of interaction between Indigenous groups and Europeans, and the role of European contact in social change in Indigenous social organization. Our current knowledge of Indigenous settlements in northeastern Taiwan suggests a relatively complex social system in the Iron Age around the 17th century, at the same time as the European presence. Northeastern Taiwan is an especially interesting example of European and Indigenous interaction because the degree of European colonization appears to have been much less pronounced compared to other places in Northern Taiwan. This region serves as a great example to explore the reaction of Indigenous people in the periphery of colonial centers. The aim of this dissertation is to explore whether there is a relationship between Indigenous social complexity in northeastern Taiwan and the European presence in the 17th century. I hypothesize that the kind of social complexity we observed throughout northeastern Taiwan may have resulted from the indirect impacts of European colonization and associated frequent trade activities. To test my hypothesis, I explore social changes at a major Iron Age site, Kiwulan (1350-1850 AD), by examining multiple lines of archaeological evidence. I use a conceptual framework of corporate/network modes to model changes in social complexity. I studied archeological materials, including trade ornaments, locally made ceramics, and burials, as proxies to investigate changes before and after the European arrival. The core of this dissertation is three research papers that focus on a specific element of the archaeological record of Kiwulan to measure and compare the extent of social inequality. I used novel methods applied for the first time to archaeological materials in this region, such as geometric morphometrics for ceramic shapes and Bayesian network modeling for understanding social changes via burial data. To better understand Indigenous reactions to foreign presence on a long-term scale, I also incorporate a later Chinese phase to provide a diachronic perspective to explore social change at Kiwulan from the 14th to 19th century. The results indicate that there was a social change from a more corporate mode to a more network mode after the European arrival in the 17th century, and before the influx of Han Chinese immigrants in the 19th century. This finding is supported by an uneven spatial distribution of prestige goods across the residential area, and a centralized pattern of burial networks that demonstrate an increased social inequality after the European presence. These changes suggest a form of indirect colonial impact – indirect stimulus of social reorganization – that is still not well understood in the archaeological literature. This dissertation demonstrates how an Indigenous society changes in a pericolonial context and shows the potential of this topic in East and Southeast Asia. In addition, an important technical contribution of this research is the use of novel reproducible quantitative methodologies. This dissertation takes an open science approach to enable maximum availability to research data, analytical processes, and final outputs through the practice of reproducible research to advocate research transparency and equal access to knowledge
Long-term chronology of subsistence and the role of intensive agriculture in the central part of the Korean peninsula during the Late Holocene
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2015The transition from foragers to farmers and the role of intensive rice agriculture have been among the most controversial subjects in Korean archaeology. However, the relatively high acidity of sediment in the Korean peninsula has made it impossible to examine faunal/floral remains directly for tracing the subsistence change. For this reason, many of the studies on the transition heavily relied on the shell middens in the coastal areas, which reflect only a small portion of the overall subsistence in the Korean Peninsula. The subsistence behaviors recorded in numerous large-scale inland habitation sites have been obscured by the overall separation between hunter-gatherer and intensive rice farmer. My dissertation research investigates the role of intensive rice farming as a subsistence strategy in the central part of the prehistoric Korean peninsula using organic geochemical analysis and luminescence dating on potsherds. The central hypothesis of this research is that there was a wide range of resource utilization along with rice farming around 3,400-2,600 BP. This hypothesis contrasts with prevailing rice based models, where climatically driven intensive rice agriculture from 3,400 BP is thought to be the dominant subsistence strategy that drove social complexity. This research focuses on four large-scale inland habitation sites that contain abundant pottery collections to evaluate the central hypothesis as well the prevailing rice-centered model. This research produced critical data for addressing prehistoric subsistence of Korean peninsula and established detailed chronology of subsistence during 3,400-1,800 BP
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Applying cultural evolutionary theory to the technological transition during the Late Pleistocene in Korea
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023The cultural-technological transition in stone artifacts from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic during the Late Pleistocene is considered as one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind, along with the appearance of modern humans. The new technologies include introduction of blade and bladelets, a high degree of morphological standardization in tool types, exploitation of bone, antler, and ivory as raw materials for tools, systematic use of grinding and pounding stone tools, and extensive use of bows and arrows. One of the explanations for this transition is to connect the technological change to hunter-gatherers’ subsistence strategies using a theoretical framework derived from cultural evolution theory. The evolutionary approach enables us to understand human behaviors by linking material evidence and socio-environmental dynamics. In this research, I explore the technological transition from the Early to Late Paleolithic in Korea represented by the appearance of stemmed points through evolutionary concepts including human behavioral ecology (HBE) and cultural transmission (CT). I also examined different likely uses of stemmed points by measuring tip cross-sectional area (TCSA). The previous studies have primarily discussed the origin and route of stemmed points and blades while my research focuses more on related human behaviors and decision-making processes. I raised three questions to address cultural and environmental roles in the technological transition: what changes in foragers’ landscape use and mobility were associated with the introduction of new tools? What were stemmed points used for? And what was the dominant mode of cultural transmission during the time of technological innovation in the Korean Late Paleolithic? My approach to answer these questions is combined with traditional theoretical frameworks and novel methods for testing hypotheses. As an answer to the first question, I hypothesized that stemmed points enabled foragers to survive in more marginal and extreme environments based on HBE. I applied quantitative analyses of artifact volumetric density, retouch frequency, composition of toolkits, and artifact raw materials. I explore environmental and demographic contexts by applying paleoclimate simulations and summed probability distribution models. My results show that forager groups using stemmed points may have been associated with occupation of marginal or extreme environments, represented by higher altitude and decreased temperature. I raised the second question to understand the possible role of stemmed points played related during the technological transition. Using the metric called tip cross-sectional area (TCSA), I was able to discriminate between different likely use classes of projectile points such as stabbing spears or poisoned arrow tips. I also explored the temporal and spatial patterns of TCSA values of stemmed points. My results show the multiple likely uses of stemmed points in a site, which indicate people might use them as multi-functional tools, with many likely designed for javelin and stabbing spear tips. I applied the CT framework to examine the process and social context of the technological transition and address the third question. I built two models that describe the transition process based on guided variation and indirect bias and tested them through computing coefficients of variation (CV), and correlation coefficients. The results show high variation and low correlation between morphological attributes on stemmed points, indicating the guided variation as the dominant mode of cultural transmission. Combining all results, my dissertation research concludes that stemmed points were introduced to maximize the landscape use during the Late Pleistocene and the shape and usage of the tools were adjusted depending on the local environment. In addition to achieving research goals, this dissertation demonstrates how to apply theoretical frameworks and test hypotheses by applying noble quantitative methodologies. My research pursues an open science approach by enabling maximum access to research data, analysis processes, and final results to promote research transparency to promote reproducibility. I expect to see that my approaches will be adopted in future research about technological transition and cultural evolution
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