Seventeen American Indian tribes having traditional prehistoric or historic ties to lands within and in the vicinity of the NTS study area were invited to participate in this study. Their participation was in keeping with a Native American consultation process that has been developed over a period of seventeen years and has involved more than sixty tribes. Indian people participating in this study were asked to identify and make recommendations about cultural resources that are potentially impacted by the underground testing activities on Pahute and Rainier Mesas, on the Nevada Test Site (NTS). This report focuses on information collected on both ethnobiology and ethnoarchaeology. Data was collected through on-site interviews with officially appointed tribal representatives and through mail surveys. This study was conducted in compliance with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978 (PL 95 -341) and was in keeping with Department of Energy (DOE) directives to be responsive to this and other laws regarding cultural resources located on DOE facilities. This study built upon previous Native American cultural resource consultation studies conducted on the Nevada Test Site.

This collection of essays addresses the history of Numic-speaking American Indians of the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau–Mohave Desert area since these lands passed into the sovereign control of the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The goal of this study is to revisit historical processes and events that transformed the lives of these Americans so profoundly that their effects are still being felt today. The perspective of contemporary Indians who shared their views with the authors, wrote portions of this history, advised on its production, and reviewed its contents, informed the versions of history relayed throughout this book. The themes explored in this collection interweave oral histories, collected by the authors through interviews with Indian people, and data from primary archival sources and publications. The essays that follow represent a small sample of themes that concern Indian people, who believe that their values, opinions, and version of historical processes and events are seldom portrayed fairly, if at all, in Western literature. This preoccupation with telling their history is all the more relevant in the context of government–to–government consultation between American Indian tribes and federal agencies, wherein productive debates about land management and resource preservation issues hinge on a shared understanding of why the land and its resources are important to Indian people and how Indian people lost control over them. It is precisely under the auspices of such a shared understanding between the Nevada Test Site and Nellis Air Force Base and several Indian tribes and organizations from Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah that this historical study was conducted.

This report presents the findings of a two-day Rapid Cultural Assessment (RCA) to assess potential impacts to resources important to American Indians from gravel road improvements associated with the Shoshone Mountain phase of the MNS Wind Farm Project on the Nevada Test Site (NTS). The study was conducted by the American Indian Writers Subgroup (AIWS), an official committee of the Consolidated Group of Tribes and Organizations (CGTO). The CGTO is composed of 16 tribes and 3 Indian organizations that have historic or cultural ties to the NTS. The work was facilitated by Dr. Stoffle from the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona (UofA). Funding was provided by DOE/NV.

These photographs offer illustrations of the people, places, and resources along the two prominent pilgrimage trails in the Timber Mountain Caldera region. These photographs were taken during the 2006 Timber Mountain Caldera Landscape Study, the 2001 Shoshone Mountain Wind Farm Environmental Assessment, and 1999 NTS Rock Art study.

Low wind speed conditions should be studied because these conditions can present risk, particularly for areas immediately surrounding the release point, where high concentrations can occur and not dissipate. The following research attempts to clarify the processes governing both the general and low wind speed cases by determining the accuracy and uncertainty of standard prediction methods for contaminant plume transport in low wind speed plume modeling. Multiple techniques were utilized to incorporate field measured data, previously gathered for a different purpose, to generate parameter distributions and ground-truth data that could be used in stochastic models for chemical plume prediction. These data were taken during a multi-day experiment performed on Frenchman Flats, a flat, dry lakebed, at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) in February of 2007 and include weather data and chemical concentrations throughout the chemical release time. I organized these data into continuous time series for each sampling location, which were represented as vectors for the statistical and mathematical analysis. I then animated these vectors with respect to time and performed a stochastic analysis which I compared to these observed vectors. Predicted vectors of chemical concentrations, based on the statistical parameter distributions generated from the observed vectors were developed and a statistical analysis was performed on the results of the stochastic process to determine how well the model predicted the plume. It was found that stochastically modeling, with SCIPuff, of contaminant plume releases in low wind speed conditions is not accurate. This was expected because below 2 m/s, plumes no longer have a Gaussian distribution and are difficult to predict because of fluctuating winds. In fact, the model only accurately predicts the period before the plume arrives at the sensor when no plume is present. It is possible, and even probable, that stochastic modeling of contaminant plumes will provide a means to compute the bounds of a release, when coupled with a model that is accurate for low wind speed conditions and includes all the complexities of the wind field. An unexpected finding is the fact that the vertical dimension of wind movement cannot be ignored in low wind speed conditions. When planning future experiments, special attention should be paid to obtaining a good representation of the 3-D wind profile.

This study is about the impacts of the transportation of low level radioactive waste (LLRW) on American Indians. The terms American Indians, Native Americans, and Indians are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to people who are members of tribes in the United States. The information contained in this report is valuable to non -Indian individuals, communities, and governments as well as to the tribes and the U.S. Department of Energy/Nevada Operations Office (DOE/NV) for which it was prepared. Many of the individuals who agreed to participate in this study asked if their non -Indian neighbors were also being given the opportunity to share their views and perspectives on the transportation of LLRW near and through their neighborhoods. Although this study was designed to include only Native Americans, it can serve as a model for additional studies in non –Indian communities. American Indian tribes have a unique status as sovereign nations within the U.S., and this study was designed to address that relationship.This study includes an assessment of social and cultural impacts. One type of impact assessment concerns the estimation and communication of risks associated with potentially dangerous technologies or substances. Such an assessment, a technological "risk assessment," is generally conducted by natural or physical scientists and focuses on the probability and magnitude of various scenarios through time (Wolfe 1988). The specialists who conduct the assessment believe their estimates reflect the "real risks" of a technology or project because the estimates were made using scientific calculations. This study is not a risk assessment. Instead, this study pays attention to the public perceptions of impacts and risks. Like other social scientists, the researchers and American Indian partners who designed and conducted this study focus on public perceptions and frame the discussions in terms of locally defined values and concerns.This study involves 29 tribes and subgroups and is therefore very complex. Every effort has been made to present information systematically to help the reader make sense of what is being presented. Information about the tribes is presented in the same order throughout the report.

This book examines the long -term consultation partnership involving a federal agency, a group of American Indian tribes, and a team of anthropologists. This book highlights the history, evolution, dynamics, and results of the consultation relationship between the U.S. Department of Energy Nevada Operations Office (DOE/NV) and 20 tribes and organizations composed of ethnic Numic-speaking Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute -Shoshone people. A team of applied anthropologists currently affiliated with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson (UofA), and a team of archaeologists from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), a unit of the University and Community College System of Nevada in Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, respectively, have provided technical assistance and contract consulting services to the Indian tribes and the DOE/NV, first on the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office (YMSCO) and, in the past decade, on the Nevada Test Site (NTS). During the early stages of the consultation relationship, the culturally affiliated Indian and pan-Indian entities unified themselves into a single indigenous organization, the Consolidated Group of Tribes and Organizations, or CGTO, for the purpose of defending their collective interests in the lands and resources comprising the NTS in south –central Nevada. Since 1994, this new Indian organization has consulted with the DOE/NV on an increasingly wider range of issues that affect Indian cultural, religious, and resource values on and around the NTS. The book also examines these cultural and religious values regarding traditional lands and resources, and the cultural significance of resources, objects, places, and landscapes within the boundaries of this facility that have been affected by DOE/NV mission activities. The consultation relationship was initiated, and continues into the present, as a result of the implementation of a series of federal environmental laws and regulations that require consultation with American Indian tribal governments when activities conducted with federal funds, in federal facilities, or both, have the potential to adversely impact traditional American Indian resources and cultural practices. Most notable among these is the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), which was passed by the United States Congress in 1978. Prior to that time, cultural resources were managed mainly in accordance with the provisions set forth in Sections 106 and 110 of the National Historic Preservation Act.

A key goal of modern evolutionary biology is the identification of genes or genome regions that have been targeted by natural selection. Methods for detecting natural selection utilise the information sampled in contemporary gene sequences and test for deviation from the null hypothesis of neutrality. One such method is the McDonald Kreitman test (MK test), which detects the the molecular 'footprint' left by natural selection by considering the frequency of observed mutations within the sampled population. In this thesis I investigate the applicability of the MK test to viral populations and develop several new methods based on the original MK test. In chapter 2, I use a combination of simulation and methodological improvements to show that the MK test can have low error when applied to analysis of RNA virus populations. Then, in chapter 3, I develop an extension of the MK test with the purpose of estimating rates of adaptive fixation for all genes of the human influenza A virus subtypes H1N1 and H3N2. My results are consistent with previous studies on selection in influenza virus populations, and provide a new perspective on the evolutionary dynamics of human influenza virus. In chapter 4 I develop a formal statistical framework based, on the MK test, for calculating the number of non neutral sites at any frequency range in the site frequency spectrum. In this framework, I introduce a new method for reconstructing the site frequency spectrum that incorporates sampling error and allows for the inclusion of prior knowledge. Using this new framework I show that the majority of nucleotide sites in hepatitis C virus sequences sampled during chronic infection represent deleterious mutations. Finally, in chapter 5 I use the generalised framework introduced in chapter 4 to develop a statistic for evaluating the deleterious mutation load of a population. I apply this test sequences that represent 96 RNA virus genes and show that my approach has comparable power to equivalent phylogenetic methods. In this thesis I have developed computationally efficient methods for analysis of genetic data from virus populations. It is my hope that these methods will become useful given the explosion in sequence data that has accompanied recent improvements in sequencing technology.

Esta pesquisa avaliou a técnica de reciclagem de solo-agregado com adição de cimento para a reconstrução de pavimentos asfálticos deteriorados. A técnica utilizada consiste da adição de cimento a uma base de solo-brita, configurando assim uma base cimentada de solo-brita-cimento. A utilização de agregados reciclados na pavimentação é prática crescente no Brasil e no mundo, recebendo incentivos públicos e sociais, além de representar grandes benefícios ambientais associados à redução do bota-fora, da exploração de recursos naturais e transporte de insumos. Tais agregados apresentam características únicas, inerentes a sua origem e utilização prévia, portanto necessitam de estudos quando de sua utilização em qualquer camada de pavimento. Os materiais utilizados nesta pesquisa são provenientes da base de solo-brita existente na rodovia Fernão Dias. A esses materiais foi adicionado cimento Portland para compor novos materiais de sub-base reciclada. Por apresentar função estrutural bastante significativa no sistema de camadas do pavimento, a camada cimentada necessita de uma criteriosa e abrangente caracterização mecânica. Esse estudo foi dividido em duas frentes distintas de avaliação: estudos laboratoriais e estudos de campo. Nos estudos laboratoriais foram testadas cinco misturas de material reciclado com cimento, com variações do tipo de materiais reciclado, teor de cimento e energia de compactação. Avaliam-se também diferentes métodos de ensaio, comparando resultados obtidos para procedimento de ensaio de concretos e argamassas, e de materiais granulares. Todas as variáveis testadas em laboratório apresentaram influência no comportamento mecânico das misturas cimentadas. Os estudos de campo consistem da construção e do monitoramento estrutural do trecho experimental, além de ensaios mecânicos em corpos de prova extraídos de pista. Foi possível avaliar a evolução da estrutura do pavimento no período de um ano e fazer a verificação dos parâmetros de rigidez in situ e em laboratório. / This research evaluated the soil-aggregate recycling with cement, soil-aggregate-cement mixtures, as a cementitious subbase solution for pavement rehabilitation. The use of recycled aggregates as paving material is an increasing practice in Brazil and abroad, receiving public and social incentives, as well as representing major environmental benefits associated with the reuse and conservation of natural resources, and reduction of the materials transportation costs. Such aggregates have unique characteristics inherent to their origin and previous use; therefore it should be extensively evaluated whenever used in any pavement layer. The materials selected to this study were collected from the base course of Fernão Dias Highway. To these materials, Portland cement was added, in order to establish new materials to the recycled subbase. Since it presents a very significant structural function in the pavement layers system, the cement treated base requires a careful and comprehensive mechanical characterization. This research was divided in laboratory and field evaluation. Five recycled mixtures with cement were studied in laboratory, varying: the recycled aggregate material, the cement percentage added to the mixture, and the energy compaction. Different laboratory standard procedures, applied for concrete and granular material, were also studied. All the variables investigated influenced the mechanical behavior of the recycled cementitious mixtures. The field study consisted of the construction and structural monitoring of an experimental test site comprised of three segments (varying the thickness of the recycled subbase layer), and also laboratory mechanical tests of field cores. The results have shown the structural evaluation of the pavement along one year, and also stiffness parameters measured in situ from the field cores.

Esta pesquisa avaliou a técnica de reciclagem de solo-agregado com adição de cimento para a reconstrução de pavimentos asfálticos deteriorados. A técnica utilizada consiste da adição de cimento a uma base de solo-brita, configurando assim uma base cimentada de solo-brita-cimento. A utilização de agregados reciclados na pavimentação é prática crescente no Brasil e no mundo, recebendo incentivos públicos e sociais, além de representar grandes benefícios ambientais associados à redução do bota-fora, da exploração de recursos naturais e transporte de insumos. Tais agregados apresentam características únicas, inerentes a sua origem e utilização prévia, portanto necessitam de estudos quando de sua utilização em qualquer camada de pavimento. Os materiais utilizados nesta pesquisa são provenientes da base de solo-brita existente na rodovia Fernão Dias. A esses materiais foi adicionado cimento Portland para compor novos materiais de sub-base reciclada. Por apresentar função estrutural bastante significativa no sistema de camadas do pavimento, a camada cimentada necessita de uma criteriosa e abrangente caracterização mecânica. Esse estudo foi dividido em duas frentes distintas de avaliação: estudos laboratoriais e estudos de campo. Nos estudos laboratoriais foram testadas cinco misturas de material reciclado com cimento, com variações do tipo de materiais reciclado, teor de cimento e energia de compactação. Avaliam-se também diferentes métodos de ensaio, comparando resultados obtidos para procedimento de ensaio de concretos e argamassas, e de materiais granulares. Todas as variáveis testadas em laboratório apresentaram influência no comportamento mecânico das misturas cimentadas. Os estudos de campo consistem da construção e do monitoramento estrutural do trecho experimental, além de ensaios mecânicos em corpos de prova extraídos de pista. Foi possível avaliar a evolução da estrutura do pavimento no período de um ano e fazer a verificação dos parâmetros de rigidez in situ e em laboratório. / This research evaluated the soil-aggregate recycling with cement, soil-aggregate-cement mixtures, as a cementitious subbase solution for pavement rehabilitation. The use of recycled aggregates as paving material is an increasing practice in Brazil and abroad, receiving public and social incentives, as well as representing major environmental benefits associated with the reuse and conservation of natural resources, and reduction of the materials transportation costs. Such aggregates have unique characteristics inherent to their origin and previous use; therefore it should be extensively evaluated whenever used in any pavement layer. The materials selected to this study were collected from the base course of Fernão Dias Highway. To these materials, Portland cement was added, in order to establish new materials to the recycled subbase. Since it presents a very significant structural function in the pavement layers system, the cement treated base requires a careful and comprehensive mechanical characterization. This research was divided in laboratory and field evaluation. Five recycled mixtures with cement were studied in laboratory, varying: the recycled aggregate material, the cement percentage added to the mixture, and the energy compaction. Different laboratory standard procedures, applied for concrete and granular material, were also studied. All the variables investigated influenced the mechanical behavior of the recycled cementitious mixtures. The field study consisted of the construction and structural monitoring of an experimental test site comprised of three segments (varying the thickness of the recycled subbase layer), and also laboratory mechanical tests of field cores. The results have shown the structural evaluation of the pavement along one year, and also stiffness parameters measured in situ from the field cores.