A persistent trend in the tourism field is the emergence of different types of niche markets. One niche form of heritage tourism that has gained popularity in Scotland since the Millennium, is ancestral tourism. Ancestral tourism is defined as choosing to travel to a host country based on one’s ancestral origins and genealogical interest. This paper traces the nature and importance of ancestral tourism for Canadian Scottish descendents in Ontario, Canada. Based on a social constructivist and multiple methods approach, the ancestral tourism initiative was reviewed within the perspectives of both the demand and supply side. The demand side findings revealed that Canadian Scottish descendents identified with and participated more in their social heritage at the local level, than in their personal heritage in the homeland. The degree to which the descendents were involved in Scottish heritage and ancestry was dependent on a variety of factors such as the emigration date of the respective ancestor, life-changing circumstances, and external stimulants. The majority of Canadian Scottish descendents were characterized as supplementary ancestral tourists and revealed that traveling to Scotland, for an ancestral tourism experience, would be one of many motivations for traveling to the homeland. Supply side findings characterized ancestral tourism as being “embryonic and full of potential”. A few challenges for those involved in the facilitation and marketing of the ancestral tourism experience were also highlighted. Characteristics associated with the ancestral tourism product were diverse and the changing nature of the genealogical resources utilized by descendents was reviewed. A shortfall of marketing the ancestral tourism initiative to only international visitors was examined, despite healthy promotional efforts such as the “Ancestral Tourism Welcome Scheme”. Key recommendations for parties interested in the ancestral tourism initiative included increased coordination among stakeholders at a regional level, increased funding and functioning capacities for the volunteer sector, re-examining current marketing strategies to include the domestic level, expanding marketing activity in the Canadian context, and maintaining ancestral tourism as a modest and “intimate” trend.

This study analyzes the vernacular architecture of ancestral Pueblo kivas dating from the Pueblo II (A.D. 900-1150) and Pueblo III (A.D. 1150-1300) periods in the northern, middle, and southern San Juan regions in the American Southwest in order to shed light on communities of practice and their social, temporal, and spatial production practices. This research specifically examines kivas--or round rooms used for ritual and domestic activities--to address how architecture, as a symbolic system, emphasized the ways in which sign-objects were actively mediated by communities of practice and how their semiotic signatures can shed light on material expressions of ancestral Pueblo group identity. The theoretical perspectives used within this study are influenced by the work of educators and anthropologists analyzing the processes by which knowledge and skills are learned and transmitted from one generation to the next--these processes are responsible for the continuity of all material culture. This study adopts a community of practice approach to analyzing ancestral Pueblo kiva architecture for two primary reasons. First, the continuity of all material culture--including architecture--depends on the processes by which knowledge and skills are learned and transmitted from one generation to the next. Second, architectural production is an additive technology in which variations in learning frameworks are encoded as choices made by production groups during construction. The methodological applications used within this study are crucial to the identification and analysis of communities of practice in that additive vernacular architectural forms are encoded with learned production techniques. Learned production techniques were materially manifested as unique modes of fabrication and were recognized as the semiotic signatures of particular communities of practice. This study is the seedling from which larger research may germinate, providing insights into large-scale anthropological processes including identity formation and maintenance, population movement, the psychological effects of population aggregation, the nature and extent of social networks, the transmission and practice of learning, the production and movement of material culture, and the development and dissolution of political and ritual organization.

Although human land use in the industrial and post-industrial world has had demonstrable impacts on global climate, human land use may also improve or reduce the resilience of ecosystems to anthropogenic and natural climate change. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that low severity anthropogenic burning by prehistoric and protohistoric indigenous societies in the ponderosa pine forests of east-central Arizona improved the resilience of these forests to low frequency climate change. I use sedimentary charcoal, phosphorus, stable carbon isotopes, and palynology to reconstruct changes in fire regimes over the last 1000 years from seven radiocarbon dated alluvial sequences in five watersheds across a gradient of indigenous land use and occupation histories. Paleoecological evidence from occupied watersheds is consistent with small-scale, agricultural burning by Ancestral Pueblo villagers (between AD 1150-1325/1400) and anthropogenic burning by Western Apaches to promote wild pant foods (ca. AD 1550-1900) in addition to naturally frequent, low severity landscape fires. Statistical reconstructions of climate driven fire activity from tree-ring records of annual precipitation indicate that Southwestern forests were vulnerable to increased fire severity and shifts to alternative stable states between AD 1300-1650. In watersheds that were unoccupied or depopulated by AD 1325, paleoecological and sedimentological evidence is consistent with an increase in fire severity, whereas areas occupied and burned by indigenous people until AD 1400 did not yield evidence of increased fire severity. These results suggest that anthropogenic burning by small-scale societies may have improved the resilience of Southwestern forests to climate driven environmental changes.

Human species display complex intraspecies population structure and unparalleled behavioral and cultural diversity. In order to elucidate human population history and pattern of evolutionary change of socio-cultural and ecological traits, the first composite phylogenetic tree of 574 human populations (ethno-linguistic groups) was created on the basis of 129 recently published phylogenetic hypotheses based on genomic, genetic and linguistic data, utilizing supertree method matrix representation with parsimony. Subsequently, 56 selected socio-cultural and ecological characters based on ethnographic cross-cultural data were optimized on topology of obtained supertrees in order to reconstruct patterns of evolutionary change and states present in ancestral populations. The results are discussed in the light of recent studies of human phylogeography and cultural phylogenetic studies.

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No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) sylvia.pdf: 10161935 bytes, checksum: 01b4aa1e3b7259839bbcfce77c2bc4ae (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-20 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The economic benefits of globalized development have been conquered at a high cost: the degradation of global ecosystems, with loss of a significant part of their biodiversity and ecosystem services, threatening the integrity of these systems and the survival of all those directly and indirectly dependent on them. The solution of this existential problem might be found in the ancestral knowledge and praxis of the peoples who occupy the world's ecosystems today and still take advantage of their common goods and services in a sustainable way. In this thesis, I studied the ancestral knowledge and praxis of the inhabitants of the Janauacá Lake, an agroecosystem on the floodplain of the Solimões/Amazon River. I investigated the geological and biological origin of the lake and the anthropic transformations, beginning in the pre-colonial period, that transformed the lake into a fluvial agroecosystem. I also investigated the origins of the ancestral knowledge conserved by the local community, constructed since prehistoric times by indigenous peoples who interacted with this and other Amazonian systems. The current residents of the lake were shown to possess a vast ancestral knowledge of the local ecosystems that they still use to exploit the common goods and services of these systems in a sustainable manner. Most attempts to introduce new cultivars into the lake or to commercialize and explore existing common goods and services at an intensity beyond the productive capacity of the system, following Western scientific and economic models, have proven fruitless. It was concluded that: 1) ancestral knowledge still offers the best technical-scientific basis for the use of ecosystem goods and services in the agroecosystem of Lake Janauacá, especially when they are destined for local community consumption, 2) the commercialization of these products and services at larger scales will only be feasible with a strict control on the intensity of exploitation by the local residents to avoid exceeding the productive limits of the ecosystem and 3) if this local control is carried out on a world scale, including all the local ecosystems exploited by global markets, it is possible to imagine a globalized market, meeting the demand of all the urban populations of the world, that would finally be sustainable or, as Morin (2013) would say, a sustainable Unitas multiplex planetarius. / Os benefícios econômicos do desenvolvimento globalizado foram conquistados a um alto custo: a degradação dos ecossistemas globais, com perda de parte significativa da sua biodiversidade e dos serviços ecossistêmicos, ameaçando a integridade desses sistemas e a sobrevivência de todas as pessoas que dependem direta e indiretamente deles. A solução desse problema existencial poderia ser encontrada no saber ancestral e nas práxis dos povos que ocupam os ecossistemas do mundo hoje e ainda aproveitam dos seus bens e serviços comuns de forma sustentável. Nessa tese, estudei o saber ancestral e a práxis dos moradores do lago do Janauacá, um agroecossistema na planície do rio Solimões. Investiguei a origem geológica e biológica do lago e as transformações antrópicas, desde o período pré-colonial, que transformaram o lago em um agroecossistema fluvial. Busquei também as origens do saber ancestral, construído desde o período pré-histórico por povos que interagiram com esse e outros sistemas amazônicos. Foi demonstrado que os moradores atuais possuem um vasto saber ancestral sobre o agroecossistema fluvial do lago do Janauacá e ainda o utilizam na vida cotidiana aproveitando de bens e serviços ecossistêmicos de forma sustentável. Constatou-se também que a maioria das tentativas de introduzir novas cultivares no lago ou de comercializar e explorar bens ou serviços comuns existentes numa intensidade além da capacidade produtiva do sistema ambiental, seguindo modelos técnico-científicos e econômicos ocidentais, foi infrutífera. Concluiu-se que: 1) o saber ancestral ainda oferece a melhor base científica para o aproveitamento dos bens e serviços ecossistêmicos no agroecossistema do lago do Janauacá, especialmente quando eles são destinados para o consumo da comunidade local; 2) a comercialização desses produtos e serviços em escalas maiores só será viável com um rigoroso controle da intensidade de exploração pelos moradores para não exceder os limites produtivos do sistema ambiental; e 3) se esse controle local for realizado em escala mundial, incluindo todos os ecossistemas locais explorados pelos mercados globais, é possível imaginar um mercado globalizado, atendendo a demanda das populações urbanas do mundo, que seria finalmente sustentável ou como diria o Morin (2013), uma Unitas multiplex planetária sustentável

To understand present patterns of biodiversity, knowledge of a lineage’s past – both evolutionary and geographic – is required. Here I present the first comprehensive phylogenomic study of an Amazonian poison frog genus, Ameerega, as well as the introduction of a new method for characterizing ancestral distributions via phylogenetic niche modeling, which I use to investigate Ameerega’s biogeographic past. I sequenced thousands of ultraconserved elements from over 100 tissue samples, representing almost every described Ameerega species, as well as undescribed cryptic diversity. My phylogenetic inference diverged strongly from those of previous studies. I also introduce a new phylogenetic niche modeling method, which accounts for issues of bias in other methods by incorporating knowledge of evolutionary relationships into niche models. Given modern-day and paleoclimatic data, species occurrence data, and a time-calibrated phylogeny, my method constructs niche models for each extant taxon, uses ancestral character estimation to reconstruct ancestral niche models, and projects these models into paleoclimate data to provide a historical estimate of the geographic range of a lineage. I demonstrate my method on the Ameerega bassleri group. I also use simulations to show that my method can reliably reconstruct the niche of a known ancestor in both geographic and environmental space.

Members of the Mylagaulidae have been known for over a century to bear nasal horns; the only rodents, extinct or extant, ever to have done so. This striking feature is known from five of the over 30 species of mylagaulid rodents discovered across North America and Eurasia, all relatively large animals that were likely less fossorial than their relatives. We describe herein a sixth new species of horned mylagaulid. This new taxon from Sioux County, Nebraska, offers the opportunity to reassess the phylogenetic relationships of Mylagaulidae and test several evolutionary hypotheses. Our analyses demonstrate that horns evolved only once in Mylagaulidae, in the common ancestor of Ceratogaulus, first as short horns exapted from the thickened nasals of fossorial ancestors, and later as taller horns. The horns evolved following a positive allometric scaling with body mass that suggests a response to predation pressure in these nearly blind animals. The evolution of tall horns also corresponds to a jump in body mass. The largest mylagaulids are not horn-bearing species, however. Additional analyses of the complex pattern of body mass evolution we reveal will be necessary to explain the evolution of the largest head-lift digging rodents in Earth history. https://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:81FE999A-F79E-4BD4-9A81-2C7D3D5D81CD.

In this thesis, I discuss the function and use of decorated ceramic bowls at Fourmile Ruin, a Pueblo IV site located in east-central Arizona. My research focused on three wares dating to the Pueblo IV period of the American Southwest (AD 1275-1450): White Mountain Red Ware, Salado Polychrome, and Jeddito Yellow Ware. These wares represent the most abundant type of decorated ceramic bowls found at Fourmile Ruin. Ceramic wares and types are described, followed by a description of their physical and stylistic characteristics and functions, an analysis of how vessels were used, and, lastly, a discussion of the contexts within which ceramic bowls may have been used. I found that decorated ceramic bowls likely functioned as serving containers, and were used on a day-to-day basis. They also may have had a symbolic function, as evidenced by the use of decoration, color, and texture, and because of their possible uses in various social or religious rituals. Furthermore, the meaning of the vessels and their uses in rituals may have changed over time. From this information, I suggest that White Mountain Red Ware, Salado polychrome, and Jeddito Black-on-yellow bowls served as utilitarian serving containers, and as a means of communicating information about personal and group identity. They were used in contexts in which expressing, teaching and reinforcing important concepts may have been integral.

No description available.

No description available.