Marcus J. Hamilton’s research while affiliated with The University of Texas at San Antonio and other places

Human lifestyles vary enormously over time and space and so understanding the origins of this diversity has always been a central focus of anthropology. A major source of this cultural variation is the variation in institutional complexity: the cultural packages of rules, norms, ontologies and expectations passed down through societies across generations. In this article, we study the emergence of institutions in small-scale societies. There are two primary schools of thought. The first is that institutions emerge top-down as rules are imposed by elites on their societies in order to gain asymmetrical access to power, resources and influence over others through coercion. The second is that institutions emerge bottom-up to facilitate interactions within populations as they seek collective solutions to adaptive problems. Here, we use Bayesian networks to infer the causal structure of institutional complexity in 172 small-scale societies across ethnohistoric western North America reflecting the wide diversity of indigenous lifestyles across this vast region immediately prior to European colonization. Our results suggest that institutional complexity emerges from underlying socioecological complexity because institutions are solutions to coordination problems in more complex environments where human–environment interactions require increased management.

Mobility, food storage, and population density are central to the movement ecology of hunter-gatherer populations and understanding how these lifestyle traits covary over time and space has long been of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists. An important question that remains unresolved is the conditions under which hunter-gatherer populations reduce the cost of mobility by increasing sedentism. Here, we model the interaction of movement frequency, distance, food storage technology and population density in ethnographic data. We show that increasing levels of food storage technology reduces annual movement frequencies but has little impact on annual total mobility costs: mobility costs are more often related to population density than storage capacity. This is because while food storage effectively increases the window of time over which resources are available, storage in non-food-producing economies cannot increase the net productivity of landscapes. Therefore, populations who move less frequently have to move further each time they move because resources remain finite and so become depleted. We derive a mathematical model of hunter-gatherer movement ecology based on optimization principles and scaling theory and test its predictions using spatially-explicit linear mixed models. We show that the interaction of mobility, storage, and population density in data are remarkably consistent with theoretical predictions. Our results suggest that while food storage is a technological response to seasonal environments, mobility reduction is primarily a behavioral response to increasing population density.

The goals of this paper are to review the history of Bonfire Shelter research and to provide an overview of its deposits that includes the bonebeds along with the lower-profile components that exist between and above them. Where warranted, the overview presents new observations resulting from ASWT work at the site, with the caveat that more formal analysis remains in progress. An additional goal of this article is to serve as an introduction to a series of more focused articles on ASWT research on Bone Bed 1 and Bone Bed 2 at Bonfire Shelter that follow in this collection. Full volume is open access available at https://jtah.org

Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year, “Tanaru”, the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia, marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, dozens of resilient isolated tribes still manage to survive. Remote sensing is a reliable method of monitoring the population dynamics of uncontacted populations by quantifying the area cleared for gardens and villages, along with the fire detections associated with the burning of those clearings. Remote sensing also provides a method to document the number of residential structures and village fissioning. Only with these longitudinal assessments can we better evaluate the current no-contact policies by the United Nations and governments, along with the prospects for the long-term survival of isolated tribes. While the world’s largest isolated indigenous metapopulation, Pano speakers in Acre, Brazil, appears to be thriving, other smaller isolated populations disconnected from metapopulations continue to be extremely vulnerable to external threats. Our applied anthropological conservation approach is to provide analyses of publicly available remote sensing datasets to help inform policies that enhance the survival and well-being of isolated cultural groups.

Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year, "Tanaru", the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia, marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, dozens of resilient isolated tribes still manage to survive. Remote sensing is a reliable method of monitoring the population dynamics of uncontacted populations by quantifying the area cleared for gardens and villages, along with the fire detections associated with the burning of those clearings. Remote sensing also provides a method to document the number of residential structures and village fissioning. Only with these longitudinal assessments can we better evaluate the current no-contact policies by the United Nations and governments, along with the prospects for the long-term survival of isolated tribes. While the world's largest isolated indigenous metapopulation, Pano speakers in Acre, Brazil, appears to be thriving, other smaller isolated populations disconnected from metapopulations continue to be extremely vulnerable to external threats. Our applied anthropological conservation approach is to provide analyses of publicly available remote sensing datasets to help inform policies that enhance the survival and well-being of isolated cultural groups.

Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Oxford Handbook is the first authoritative reference work for archaeological network research, featuring current topical trends and covering the archaeological application of network methods and theories. This is elaborately demonstrated through substantive topics and case studies drawn from a breadth of periods and cultures in world archaeology. It highlights and further develops the unique contributions made by archaeological research to network science, especially concerning the development of spatial and material culture network methods, and approaches to studying long-term network change. This is the go-to resource for students and scholars wishing to explore how network science can be applied in archaeology through an up-to-date overview of the field.

This study examines the fluting of two well‐known Late Pleistocene fluted point types in North America: Clovis and Folsom. Using scaling analyses, we assess the changing relationship between flute length and point length in a large sample of each type. Researchers use scaling to investigate the physical constraints of an object and determine how its dimensions change with size. We compare the strength and consistency of the scaling relationships between the older Clovis and the younger Folsom with the aim of shedding light on scaling differences, if any, over their temporal span. Our results show that there is a significant difference in the relationship of fluting length to point length between these types. In Folsom point manufacture, flute length increases nearly twice as fast with increasing point length than in Clovis. Importantly, the scaling of flute length to point length relationship is isometric (linear) in the Folsom sample, whereas it is allometric (sublinear) in the Clovis sample. In other words, Folsom flintknappers maintained a constant ratio of flute length to point length. Clovis flintknappers were less concerned about maintaining this ratio. We attribute this difference to a potentially increasing, or changing, functional role of fluting in Folsom.

Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year “Tanaru”, the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, dozens of resilient isolated tribes still manage to survive. Remote sensing is a reliable method of monitoring the population dynamics of uncontacted populations by quantifying the area cleared for gardens and villages, along with the fire detections associated with the burning of those clearings. Remote sensing also provides a method to document the number of residential structures and village fissioning. Only with these longitudinal assessments can we better evaluate the current no-contact policies by governments and the United Nations, along with the prospects for the long-term survival of isolated tribes. While the world’s largest isolated indigenous metapopulation, Pano speakers in Acre, Brazil, appears to be thriving, other smaller isolated populations disconnected from metapopulations, such as the single village of isolated Yanomami in northern Brazil, continue being extremely vulnerable to external threats. Our applied anthropological conservation approach is to provide analyses of publicly available remote sensing datasets to help inform policies that enhance survival and well-being of isolated cultural groups.