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No description available.

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Ethnohistoric accounts and Plymouth Colony court records support the idea that territorially, socially and politically distinct communities existed along the shoreline of Cape Cod during the seventeenth-century. The archaeological record of Cape Cod, Massachusetts supports the concept of the development of conditionally sedentary, territorial communities at the major estuaries after 2000 B.P. Following Bragdon (1996) I suggest that a sachemship was an “on-going and organic social grouping” created both by the agency of households and the strategies of sachems. Because a sachemship consisted of both the sachem's kin and others who actively supported his political ambition, I argue that the relationship between households and sachems was permeated with the expectations and obligations of kinship. Following Blanton (1995) I propose that within each sachemship households acted to achieve and maintain social status by actively emulating the household practices of a sachem and members of his lineage (related households). In effect, emulation was an active strategy of affiliation. The emulation of household practices would have included forming, shaping and decorating ceramic vessels in a manner consistent with the women of the sachem's household and lineage. Therefore, I expect that there should be strong concordance of ceramic style within each sachemship, and considerable variability between sachemships. In this manner then, the creation of ceramic style within the Late Woodland sachemships of Cape Cod was exceptionally localized and historically contingent. To evaluate this proposal I compared the decorative attributes of 161 Late Woodland vessel lots from two historically recorded sachemships on the outer Cape. The results indicate that two kinds of shell-tempered vessels were created in the sachemships of the Cape during the Late Woodland period. Simply decorated and cord-marked vessels were produced for daily household use. In addition, carefully made, elaborately decorated vessels were made for use in the public feasts that deepened the attachment of households and sachems. The latter category of ceramic vessels provides the greatest possibility for examining ceramic design variability as it pertains to the creation of social identity.

This dissertation explores the material and spatial expressions of gender and relations on the rural landscape of the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Although the cult of domesticity has been the most widely studied, additional gender ideologies such as equal rights feminism, domestic reform, and others—also structured human interactions during the second half of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Three homelots on the village landscape served as the primary case studies for this research. Architectural changes and ceramic assemblages from archaeological deposits were central to the analyses. Three models were used to understand gender ideologies, including Yentsch's (1991) model for differential color coding and usage of ceramic vessels, Wall's (1994) analysis of changing decorative motifs, and Shackel's (1993) and Leone's (1999) formulas for measuring the penetration of modern discipline. Deviations from expected material patterns were re-examined within a dialectical framework. This work stresses the multiscalar aspect of landscapes and includes the interior spaces of structures. Additionally, this research emphasizes the interrelatedness of modern discipline and gender ideologies, both of which were expressed through the materiality of segmented dining. This research yielded several important results. First a separation of gender roles existed prior to the codification of the cult of domesticity and was, therefore, not the exclusive domain of that ideology. Second, domesticity appeared and was codified in this rural village at about the same time as its material manifestations were occurring in more urban locations. Third, the extent to which a household followed the dictates of a given gender ideology was influenced by its position in the developing class structure. Finally, the materiality of domestic reform, equal rights feminism, and other alternative gender systems occurred in Deerfield at a level beyond the home: that is, at the level of the Street or village. These results mean that the advances in the study of gender by historical archaeologists can be productively supplemented by considering a wider range of gender systems, observing their articulation with developing class systems, and considering the many spatial scales influenced by gender.

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This project explores the social dynamics that lead toward, or filter out, individuals as prospective or practicing archaeologists. There is a growing awareness of, and sensitivity to, the people studied by archaeologists, as well as to the people who "consume" archaeological studies. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the archaeologist him- or herself as a key element in the practice of archaeology. This study uses auto-ethnography and biography to explore the processes that select for the individuals who become archaeologists. The social dynamics involved in this selection process "normalize" the profession by "normalizing" its practitioners. Illuminating the dynamics that create this sense of normalcy exposes the impact these processes have on archaeology and, more broadly, on anthropology. Questioning these dynamics creates the opportunity to expand the practice of archaeology to include more than the perspective of the "normalized", in the same way that allowing the producers of culture to contribute to the study of their material culture and cultural experience adds insight and nuance to our understanding of culture. As the call for a reflexive archaeology is heard and responded to, archaeologists will likely move beyond the normalizing consensus of the present day to one that is explicitly aware of the relationships among those who study the past, those who are studied and the audiences for whom these studies are done. There is demonstrably a much broader diversity in the people who practice archaeology than the discipline admits. In the past two decades there has been a growing interest in, and demand for, allowing the obvious existing diversity in the profession to be recognized, and to be broadened to include experiences and perspectives that have not yet been recognized, articulated, and incorporated in archaeological discourse. This project is an attempt to illustrate how this could be done, to identify some of the social dynamics that impede this agenda, and to sketch some of the contributions such an effort could make in developing archaeology as a discipline that studies the full range of human variation.

Olieboomspoort is an archaeological site, which has evidence of human occupation going back possibly to the Earlier Stone Age, but more substantially to the Middle and the Later Stone Age. This site is located in the Waterberg Mountains of Limpopo Province, within the South African Savanna Biome. Archaeological excavations at this site began with the late Revil Mason in 1954, who attributed lithics from the Middle Stone Age deposits to the Pietersburg Industry. Mason did not mention any faunal remains from these Middle Stone Age layers. The site was later investigated by Maria van der Ryst, who excavated the Later Stone Age layers. In 2018, a new project led by Aurore Val and colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand started at the site. This study focuses on the faunal material excavated in 2018 and 2019 from the Middle Stone Age layers. In southern Africa, Middle Stone Age archaeological research and, consequently, archaeozoological research, is concentrated on coastal and near coastal sites. While the research from these coastal and near coastal sites is insightful, little is known for the interior of southern Africa. The current study forms part of a series of renewed research at inland archaeological sites, aimed at aiding our understanding of the diversity of Middle Stone Age societies. This work presents the first taphonomic and archaeozoological analyses of the Middle Stone Age fauna from Olieboomspoort. A total of 1296 specimens were analysed. These include specimens that were plotted during excavations and those retrieved from the sieving refuse. This study identified the following species Alcelaphus sp., Oreotragus oreotragus, Raphicerus campestris, Raphicerus sp., Redunca sp., Sylvicapra grimmia, Syncerus caffer, Tragelaphus oryx, Equus sp., Proteles cristata, Felis silvestris, Papio sp., Lepus sp., snakes and tortoises. Thus, the faunal assemblage is taxonomically relatively diverse with 16 species identified. Bovids are the most represented and there is an abundance of small bovids. The presence of the extinct equid Equus capensis is suspected. Two species of carnivores, aardwolf (Proteles cristata) and African wild cat (Felis silvestris) were also identified. The taphonomic signatures of the faunal assemblage are indicative of several biotic modifiersincluding invertebrates. There is limited evidence for carnivore and porcupine action. Evidence of human modification is low and attested by only six pieces with cut-marks. This study identified the role of water, which likely transported some faunal material, and could have led to recovery biases. The taxonomic composition of the faunal assemblage provides a window onto the palaeohabitats present at the site. Several taxa, including the steenbok (Raphicerus campestris) and Equus sp. prefer open habitats. The identification of species that are water-dependent such as the buffalo (Syncerus caffer), and one species of reedbuck (Redunca sp), is suggestive of the presence of a nearby water source. This is consistent with the proximity of the Riet Spruit, which at present is a small river running a few meters below the site. Finally, the identification of baboons, leporids and klipspringers (Oreotragus oreotragus), animals which thrive in rocky areas, underpins the rocky morphology of the site's locality. Recent dating of two fossil bones from the Olieboomspoort Middle Stone Age layers by Val et al. (2021) gives a range of 150 kya, which places those layers within the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. MIS 6 was a glacial phase, which exact palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental characteristics are still poorly understood for southern Africa, where there are also few dated archaeological sites from that period. Thus, we know relatively little about the subsistence strategies of MIS 6 human groups. In light of the above data, the current study adds some information about MIS 6 human subsistence strategies within the Savanna Biome.

The research problem is the impact of decision making and information sharing on hunter-gatherer subsistence and settlement. The problem is placed in context with a review of general hunter-gatherer models which finds that information has not been treated as a dynamic variable. Two approaches to decison making and information sharing--rational decision making and a man-environment learning model--are evaluated to identify their strengths and weaknesses. The man-environment learning model demonstrates a greater ability to incorporate anthropologically significant variables. Through a simulation approach, the man-environment learning model is then applied to four problem areas in regional subsistence and settlement--the role of coordinated regional settlement, aggregated versus dispersed settlement systems, coastal versus interior settlement, and hunter-gatherer settlement along an agricultural frontier. In each case the regional man-environment model provides insight into how information sharing and decision making mechanisms create variability in settlement and subsistence activities which non-learning subsistence and settlement models ignore.