
Matthew DouglassUniversity of Nebraska–Lincoln | NU · Master of Applied Science, College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources
Matthew Douglass
PhD (Univ. of Auckland)
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46
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Publications (46)
The three authors research surface archaeological records dominated by low-density scatters and isolated artifacts, archaeological phenomena frequently encountered during cultural resource management (CRM) projects in areas of the United States and Australia. We each began researching surface artifact scatters for different reasons but converged on...
This article quantifies Daasanach water insecurity experiences in northern Kenya, examines how water insecurity is associated with water borrowing and psychosocial stress, and evaluates if water borrowing mitigates the stress from water insecurity. Of 133 households interviewed in seven communities, 94.0% were water insecure and 74.4% borrowed wate...
Objective
Water plays a critical role in the production of food and preparation of nutritious meals, yet few studies have examined the relationship between water and food insecurity. The primary objective of this study, therefore, was to examine how experiences of household water insecurity (HWI) relate to experiences of household food insecurity (...
Globally, fire is a primary agent for modifying environments through the long-term coupling of human and natural systems. In southern Africa, control of fire by humans has been documented since the late Middle Pleistocene, though it is unclear when or if anthropogenic burning led to fundamental shifts in the region's fire regimes. To identify poten...
The late Holocene was a period of cultural change along the west coast of South Africa, with widespread archaeological evidence for shifts in settlement patterns and economic activity. With these changes, we expect variability in the movement patterns of resident populations. In this proof-of-concept paper, we use lithic assemblages from Spring Cav...
This article quantifies Daasanach water insecurity experiences in Northern Kenya, examines how water insecurity is associated with water borrowing and psychosocial stress, and evaluates if water borrowing mitigates the stress from water insecurity. Of 133 households interviewed in 7 communities, 95% were water insecure and 74.4% borrowed water thre...
Despite advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Recent inquiries suggest that human evolution reflects a long history of interconnections between the behavior of humans and their surroundin...
Stone tools represent the largest source of information about past human behaviors on the planet. Much of the information about stone tools remains untranslated because we have little understanding about what the variation in artifact form means. One component of stone tool production that has less ambiguity is the reductive nature of the technolog...
One of the greatest difficulties with evolutionary approaches in the study of stone tools (lithics) has been finding a mechanism for tying culture and biology in a way that preserves human agency and operates at scales that are visible in the archaeological record. The concept of niche construction, whereby organisms actively construct their enviro...
Water salinity is a growing global environmental health concern. However, little is known about the relation between water salinity and chronic health outcomes in non-coastal, lean populations. Daasanach pastoralists living in northern Kenya, traditionally rely on milk, yet are experiencing socioecological changes and have expressed concerns about...
The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. This analytical fo...
The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistake in the presentation of the author’s name.
One of the greatest difficulties with evolutionary approaches in the study of stone tools (lithics) has been finding a mechanism for tying culture and biology in a way that preserves human agency and operates at scales that are visible in the archaeological record. The concept of niche construction, whereby organisms actively construct their enviro...
The Pleistocene ungulate communities from the western coastal plains of South Africa's Cape Floristic Region (CFR) are diverse and dominated by grazers, in contrast to the region's Holocene and historical faunas, which are relatively species-poor and dominated by small-bodied browsers and mixed feeders. An expansion of grassy habitats is clearly im...
The three-dimensional (3D) revolution promised to transform archaeological practice. Of the technologies that contribute to the proliferation of 3D data, photogrammetry facilitates the rapid and inexpensive digitization of complex subjects in both field and lab settings. It finds additional use as a tool for public outreach, where it engages audien...
Virtual Reconstruction is a powerful tool broadly suited to a diverse array of archaeological heritage applications. In practice, however, reconstruction has largely focused on grand and monumental sites. Here we present two case studies–one from southern Oklahoma, the other from western Nebraska–to explore the use of this technology for more commo...
Photogrammetry emerged in the 1800s as a means to take measurements on still photographs. By the 2000s, the originally expensive and specialized procedure gave way to an inexpensive and accessible technique, requiring only a digital camera, computer, and low‐cost or free software to generate detailed three‐dimensional models created from a series o...
Artifacts with varying use-lives have different discard rates and hence are represented unequally among archaeological assemblages. As such, the ability to gauge the use-lives of artifacts is important for understanding the formation of archaeological assemblage variability. In lithic artifacts, use-life can be expressed as the extraction of utilit...
Multiple periods of dune activation triggered by drought have occurred within the Nebraska Sand Hills, the most recent period occurred during the medieval climate anomaly (MCA; A.D. 900–1350). We present a pilot study where we have successfully adapted a standard chronology-building tool, optically stimulated luminescence dating, to investigate the...
While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition...
Silcrete flakes and cores are abundant in the surface assemblages from western New South Wales, Australia but retouched tools made from silcrete are much less frequent, especially the heavily retouched forms like flake adzes. The distribution and abundance of these forms together with other silcrete retouched tools is investigated. While heavily re...
Artifact collectors are commonplace the world over. They range from individuals with personal collections, to organized looting ventures which supply artifacts to market. In the United States, a strong tradition of artifact collecting exists in the North American Great Plains. In this region, artifact collections obtained from private lands are a c...
When initially discovered in 2014, 21 Early Stone Age (ESA) pointed stone bifaces from the Uitspankraal 1 (UPK1) in western South Africa were left in the field but recorded for photogrammetry analysis. Digital models developed with these data made it possible to recognize that UPK1 handaxes were routinely produced with a process that emphasized out...
Recent studies hypothesise that the limited archaeological presence during the later Marine Isotope Stage 3 in southern Africa’s Winter Rainfall Zone was caused by a reorganisation of land-use patterns by past groups in the region. In this study, we examine the composition of a lithic assemblage dated to this period at the site of Putslaagte 1 in t...
Photogrammetry provides an accessible, cost-effective means of creating a high-resolution, digital 3D record of archaeological artefacts. The methodology has been widely adopted, but a number of issues remain, especially in relation to model variability, and to misalignments that result in gaps in the models generated. Two new approaches are presen...
Both quartz and silcrete cobbles are abundant in the stony desert regions of western New South Wales, Australia and were used by Aboriginal people who occupied these regions from the mid to late Holocene. Archaeologists often characterise quartz as an inferior material for flaking when compared to silcrete, but Aboriginal people made intensive use...
The logistics of time-efficient yet accurate documentation of archaeological features are a challenge within the context of pedestrian survey. Here we present results of two case studies documenting the use of photogrammetry under field conditions within the Great Plains. Results demonstrate the ease with which high quality models can be obtained w...
We match stone artefact distributions and assemblage compositions at the local geographical scale to measures of both complex topography and environmental history, as suggested by the work of Bailey and King. By comparing two study regions that have different topographic complexity measures, one in western New South Wales, Australia, and the other...
Stone artifacts from Fowlers Gap western New South Wales, Australia, were manufactured from silcrete, quartz, and quartzite. Conchoidal flaking was used to manufacture artifacts from all three materials. However, it is the use of these artifacts rather than simply their manufacture that explains the composition of the archaeological assemblages. Ar...
Twenty years ago, Stafford-Smith and Morton (1990) published an ecological assessment of Australia as a series of propositions that illustrated why the continent stood apart ecologically from other arid areas around the world. The assessment has now been updated in the light of recent work (Morton et al. 2011). Both studies provide an opportunity t...
This study reports on the execution of a controlled experiment designed to address the impacts of cattle trampling on surface scatters of chipped stone found in Great Plains contexts. A key focus of the experiment’s design is an evaluation of the relationship between trampling duration and substrate compaction on the severity of artifact breakage....
This volume contains thirty-five papers from a 2010 conference on landscape archaeology focusing on the definition of landscape as used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers, in contrast to the definition favored by postprocessual archaeologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists. This tension provi...
The surface archaeological record is abundant in some parts of arid Australia and, if analysed with attention to the history of deposition, it provides an accessible resource with which to assess past landscape use. Here, we report results of studies of the mid-late Holocene Aboriginal occupants of one part of the Australian arid zone, based on ana...
Archaeologists today, as in the past, continue to divide their stone artifact assemblages into categories and to give privilege
to certain of these categories over others. Retouched tools and particular core forms, for instance, are thought to contain
more information than the unretouched flakes and flake fragments. This reflects the assumption tha...
Abstract. Recent studies using a methodology for the quantification of cortex in lithic assemblages
indicate a deficit in cortical surface area in mid to late Holocene contexts in western New South Wales,
Australia. This result is interpreted to reflect the extensive transport of artefacts away from their place
of production, thus providing a measu...
Investigating past human-environment interactions requires not only suitable environmental proxies and well-dated archaeological records, but also a uniform temporal resolution between the two. In the arid interior of Australia, the archaeological record of human occupation is known only from relatively few locations, and palaeoenvironmental record...
Recent studies make use of cortex proportion as a proxy measurement for the impact of artefact
transport on assemblage formation. Cortex in these studies is measured on an ordinal scale and analysed
in relation to mechanical measurements of artefact size. Here we report on the use of a 3D laser scanner
to obtain precise measurements from experiment...
We describe an experimental test and archaeological application of the solid geometry method for the interpretation of cortical surface area in lithic assemblages proposed by Dibble et al. (2005). Experimental results support the method's accuracy while archaeological application to assemblages from western New South Wales, Australia suggests a rep...
We describe an experimental test and archaeological application of the solid geometry method for the interpretation of cortical surface area in lithic assemblages proposed by Dibble et al. (2005). Experimental results support the method's accuracy while archaeological application to assemblages from western New South Wales, Australia suggests a rep...
Quarries are often defined as locations where people in the past gained access to raw material. Here we consider the definition of quarries in a raw material-rich environment. Stone artifacts found adjacent to two silcrete outcrops that might be labeled as "quarries" are compared with those found at a creek-side "occupation" location in western New...
Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nebraska--Lincoln, 2005. Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis addresses the research potential of informal lithic technologies through a case study of surface deposits from western New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The defining characteristic of the lithic remains of the region is a dearth of formalized patterning. As a consequence, researchers have historically equated these remains with a casual...