David Hurst Thomas's research while affiliated with American Museum of Natural History and other places

... Paleoecological results confirm previous assessments and partition the LHDP into three phases: an initial 900-year dry period, 200 years of wetter climate, and two final centuries of extreme drought. New pollen and radiocarbon evidence from four wet-meadow sites (presented in Mensing et al. 2023) demonstrates a sedimentation hiatus (or significant slowdown) during the period about 2000-1800 cal BP, interpreted as a severe drought signal across the central Great Basin. The geographical extent of the LHDP remained stable between 39 o N and 40 o N latitude, which is similar to the latitude boundary of the ENSO dipole (Wise 2010), with sites to the north remaining wet and dry climate prevailing in the south. ...

... A summed probability distribution (SPD) of radiocarbon ages was established as a proxy measure for changes in human settlement density during the Holocene in northeastern California (e.g., Rick, 1987;Riris, 2018). Radiocarbon dates (n = 135) used in this analysis derive from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) (Kelly et al., 2022). All radiocarbon dates were calibrated using the IntCal20 calibration curve (Reimer et al., 2020) using the rcarbon package (Bevan and Crema, 2018) in R (R Development Core Team, 2022) and produced an SPD to characterize patterns in the radiocarbon database. ...

... High-precision chronologies from Gatecliff Shelter and Alta Toquima (Kennett et al. 2014(Kennett et al. , 2020 anchor the southern end of our north-south transect : Figure 9). To further historicize human responses, we redated James Creek Shelter (Elston and Budy 1990) and Pie Creek Shelter (McGuire et al. 2004), both located toward the northern end of the dipole transect ( Figure 1). ...

... O ZooarchBR apresenta 18 espécies de peixes, moluscos e crustáceos registradas como de importância socioeconômica no Plano de Ação Nacional para a Conservação das Espécies Ameaçadas e de Importância Socioeconômica do Ecossistema Manguezal (PAN Manguezal), criado por meio da Portaria nº 647/2019 e desenvolvido com apoio dos representantes de povos e comunidades tradicionais (BRASIL, 2015). A partir do mapeamento da distribuição dessas espécies de importância socioeconômica é possível, por exemplo, levantar discussões e ações voltadas à criação de unidades de conservação que contemplem o uso sustentável dos recursos (THOMPSON, et al. 2020;REEDER-MYERS et al., 2022). ...

... contemporary peer-reviewed literature (e.g., [24][25][26][27][28][29][30]). Their use, however, is an archaeological practice, having little to do with how people lived in the past. ...

... The Promontory caves were excavated in 1930-1931 by Julian Steward (1937) and again between 2011 and 2014 by Ives, Janetski, and colleagues (Billinger and Ives 2015;Ives 2014Ives , 2020Ives, Froese, et al. 2014). Both research episodes recovered an abundance of exquisitely preserved organic remains, including moccasins, basketry, and cordage; many varied gaming pieces; a complete range of stone and bone tools, from hunting weaponry to hide processing tools; ceramics; items of adornment; indications of ceremonial life such as rock art and incised tablets; and animal bone, hide, hair, and dung ( Figure 2; Ives, Froese, et al. 2014;Thomas 2018;Yanicki and Ives 2017). Two aspects of the Promontory occupation are abundantly clear: bison and other large game animals were intensively hunted near the caves, and Cave 1 (42BO1) was a residential location at which women, men, subadults, and children were present at various seasons for extended periods of time over one or two human generations. ...

... A few individuals we studied exhibit opposing covariance in nitrogen and carbon values (such as nitrogen declining but carbon values increasing; for example, see Guomianyichang M068). These patterns have been considered potential evidence of physiological stress (Beaumont and Montgomery 2016;Garland et al. 2018;King et al. 2018) but can also occur when a child is weaned onto a diet that is different from the milk they were previously consuming (i.e., mother's diet). If an infant was weaned using foods that have more positive δ 13 C values (such a millets) than what the lactating female had been consuming (captured in the milk), we would see nitrogen values continuing to decline (removal of milk from diet) while carbon values increased (consumption of foods like millets with higher δ 13 C values). ...

... To date, no mounds of this period have been identified along the SFFDR, or, for that matter, in West Tennessee. West Tennessee also falls outside the range of the bone-pin interaction sphere that encompassed a significant swath of the Midwest to the north (Jefferies, 1996), the heartland of the Benton interaction sphere of the upper Tombigbee River and middle Tennessee River drainages to the south and east (Deter-Wolf, 2004), and dispersed exchange networks involving copper and mortuary ritual (Sanger et al., 2018). In these regards, the ways that Middle Archaic people in the SFFDR drainage exploited, marked, and interacted across their landscape represent a general continuation of Early Archaic patterns, albeit with some differences in projectile point forms (Smith, 1991) and perhaps a slightly more intensive or repeated commitment to certain locales. ...

... The Creeks' reputation as powerful and successful warriors meant that the nation was wellplaced to absorb the remnants of previously scattered polities. Bioarchaeological studies of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission community at Santa Catalina de Guale, Florida, have similarly indicated that Guale communities retained the hierarchical structures of pre-contact Mississippian society despite incorporation into the Spanish mission and heavy depopulation as a result of disease, food stress, and exploitation (Larsen et al., 2001;Winkler et al., 2017). In this case, the maintenance of pre-contact hierarchies would have allowed elites to maintain preferential access to resources during a time in which population groups were vulnerable to unstable conditions. ...

... Almost thirty years after the issue of NAGPRA, the world of professionals continues to be split (36). ...