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"Maschner, Herbert D. G"
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Grand Challenges for Archaeology
This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.
Journal Article
Anthropology, Space, and Geographic Information Systems
Major advances in the use of geographic information systems have been made in both anthropology and archaeology.Yet there are few published discussions of these new applications and their use in solving complex problems.
eBook
Sustaining Sanak Island, Alaska: A Cultural Land Trust
Sanak Island is the easternmost of the Aleutian Islands and was inhabited by the Aleut (Unangan) peoples for nearly 7000 years. The past few centuries of Sanak Island life for its Aleut residents can be summarized from ethnohistoric documents and extensive interviews with former residents as shifting local-global economic patterns beginning with the sea otter fur trade, followed by cod and salmon fishing, fox farming, and cattle ranching through waves of Russian, American, and Scandinavian authority and/or influence. As the industries changed and the island absorbed new peoples with new goals, Aleut identity and practices also changed as part of these shifting economic and social environments. Sanak Island was abandoned in the 1970s and although uninhabited today, Sanak Island is managed as an important land trust for the island’s descendants that serves local peoples as a marine-scape rich in resources for Aleut subsistence harvesting and as a local heritage site where people draw on the diverse historical influences and legacies. Further, this move from an industrial heritage to contemporary local subsistence economies facilitated by a commercial fishing industry is a unique reversal of development in the region with broad implications for community sustainability among indigenous communities. We find that by being place-focused, rather than place-based, community sustainability can be maintained even in the context of relocation and the loss of traditional villages. This will likely become more common as indigenous peoples adapt to globalization and the forces of global change.
Journal Article
An Introduction to the Biocomplexity of Sanak Island, Western Gulf of Alaska
The Sanak Biocomplexity Project is a transdisciplinary research effort focused on a small island archipelago 50 km south of the Alaska Peninsula in the western Gulf of Alaska. This team of archaeologists, terrestrial ecologists, social anthropologists, intertidal ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, paleoecologists, and modelers is seeking to understanding the role of the ancient, historic, and modern Aleut in the structure and functioning of local and regional ecosystems. Using techniques ranging from systematic surveys to stable isotope chemistry, long-term shifts in social dynamics and ecosystem structure are present in the context of changing climatic regimes and human impacts. This paper presents a summary of a range of our preliminary findings.
Journal Article
An Introduction to the Biocomplexity of Sanak Island, Western Gulf of Alaska1
The Sanak Biocomplexity Project is a transdisciplinary research effort focused on a small island archipelago 50 km south of the Alaska Peninsula in the western Gulf of Alaska. This team of archaeologists, terrestrial ecologists, social anthropologists, intertidal ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, paleoecologists, and modelers is seeking to understanding the role of the ancient, historic, and modern Aleut in the structure and functioning of local and regional ecosystems. Using techniques ranging from systematic surveys to stable isotope chemistry, long-term shifts in social dynamics and ecosystem structure are present in the context of changing climatic regimes and human impacts. This paper presents a summary of a range of our preliminary findings.
Journal Article
Marauding Middlemen: Western Expansion and Violent Conflict in the Subarctic
The impact of Western expansion on the Subarctic, with western Europeans advancing from the east and Russians and Americans from the West, changed the tempo and nature of indigenous warfare by creating new and intensified opportunities for young males to compete. The developing fur trade changed the demographics, trade networks, access to the sources of new goods, and the competitive structure among all subarctic societies. Western goods, as critical material resources, have been argued as being the objects over which warfare is instigated. We argue that these goods replaced indigenous goods as high-status items and that possession of them was another means to increase status and prestige among young males. This competition for access to goods considered to be high status, and sometimes just competition for status, formed the foundation for violent conflict in the western American Subarctic.
Journal Article
Traditions Past and Present: Allen McCartney and the Izembek Phase of the Western Alaska Peninsula
In 1971 Allen McCartney, together with Nancy McCartney and Michael Yarborough, conducted the first archaeological investigations on the lower Alaska Peninsula. The goal of their research was to investigate the boundary zone between the Aleut of the Aleutian Islands and western Peninsula, and the Yupik/Alutiiq peoples to the northeast. Excavating at three sites, McCartney and crew found the remains of villages dating to approximately A.D. 1000 that shared a particular type of projectile that became known as the Izembek Point, as well as a suite of more northern features such as polished slate, pottery, and a house with a stone foundation and a whale bone superstructure. McCartney defined the Izembek Phase based on these finds. Research conducted by Maschner over the last eleven years allows for an evaluation of the Izembek Phase and provides the necessary data to place McCartney's initial important discoveries in a broader context. Based on new dates and fieldwork, the Izembek Phase as McCartney defined it is now quite different from its original formulation.
Journal Article
Stylistic Change as a Self-Organized Critical Phenomenon: An Archaeological Study in Complexity
Archaeologists can learn from models of evolution as a self-organized critical phenomenon. Self-organized critical systems are large, interactive systems that organize into a critical state where minor events can trigger chain reactions. Such systems demonstrate power-law distributions in the size of changes, or \"avalanches,\" that occur. The theory of self-organized criticality is important in that it implies that the evolution of complex systems may be driven more by interactions between agents than by external events or natural selection. Stylistic changes may be examples of avalanches of interconnected events. Evidence for self-organized criticality is shown for stylistic evolution in historical pottery styles from New York State and is used to evaluate the nature of a prehistoric pottery typology from the Southwest.
Journal Article