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A bighorn sheep horned headdress discovered near the Green River, in eastern Utah within the United States is reviewed. Its history, discovery and subsequent analysis is described. It appears to have been a powerful headpiece employed in a symbolic context for religious expression, perhaps worn by a ritualist in association with the hunt for large game animals (bighorn sheep, antelope or deer). It was likely associated with the Fremont Cultural Tradition, as it was dated by radiocarbon assay to a calibrated, calendar age of 1020-1160 CE and was further adorned with six Olivella biplicata shell beads (split-punched type) originating from the California coast that apparently date to that same general time frame. Such headdresses are mentioned in the ethnographic literature for several Great Basin and American Southwestern indigenous cultures and appear to have been used in various religious rituals. Bighorn sheep horned headdresses can be fashioned directly from the horns of a bighorn sheep and can be functionally fashioned as a garment to be worn on the head without excessive weight and with little difficulty to the wearer. Ethnographic data testifies that the bighorn sheep was applied as a cultural symbol and was employed as a 'visual prayer' relating to the cosmic regeneration of life (e.g. good health, successful human reproduction, sufficient rain and water, and ample natural resource [i.e. animal and plant] fertility).

Variation in the costs and benefits of maize agriculture relative to local foraging opportunities structured variation in the relative intensity of agricultural strategies pursued by prehistoric peoples in the American Southwest. The material remains of Fremont farmers and horticulturists, long identified as the \"northern periphery\" of Southwestern archaeological traditions, are examined as a case representing extreme intersite variation in the economic importance of farming. New data quantifying the energetic gains associated with maize agriculture in Latin America are compared to caloric return rates for hunting and collecting indigenous foods. These data suggest that prehistoric maize farming was economically comparable to many local wild plants, but that intensive farming practices were most similar to very low-ranked seeds. The model predicts a continuum of pre-historic strategies that included horticulture within a system of indigenous resource collection and high residential mobility at one end, and at the other sedentary farmers heavily invested in agricultural activities with residences maintained near fields during a significant portion of the growing season. Differences in agricultural strategies should have been strongly influenced by the effects of local ecology on the marginal gains for time spent in maize fields and the abundance of key, high-ranked wild foods, not harvest yields per se. Increasing agricultural investments are expected with decreasing opportunities to collect higher-ranked foods, while decreases in time spent farming are expected only with increases in alternative economic opportunities.

A bighorn sheep horned headdress discovered near the Green River, in eastern Utah within the United States is reviewed. Its history, discovery and subsequent analysis is described. It appears to have been a powerful headpiece employed in a symbolic context for religious expression, perhaps worn by a ritualist in association with the hunt for large game animals (bighorn sheep, antelope or deer). It was likely associated with the Fremont Cultural Tradition, as it was dated by radiocarbon assay to a calibrated, calendar age of 1020-1160 CE and was further adorned with six Olivella biplicata shell beads (split-punched type) originating from the California coast that apparently date to that same general time frame. Such headdresses are mentioned in the ethnographic literature for several Great Basin and American Southwestern indigenous cultures and appear to have been used in various religious rituals. Bighorn sheep horned headdresses can be fashioned directly from the horns of a bighorn sheep and can be functionally fashioned as a garment to be worn on the head without excessive weight and with little difficulty to the wearer. Ethnographic data testifies that the bighorn sheep was applied as a cultural symbol and was employed as a 'visual prayer' relating to the cosmic regeneration of life (e.g. good health, successful human reproduction, sufficient rain and water, and ample natural resource [i.e. animal and plant] fertility).

Archeologists have long assumed that transport considerations have been important in structuring various aspects of the archeological record. An optimality model, derived from the principles of evolutionary ecology, is presented to investigate the trade-off between field processing and transport for central place foragers. The model implicates (1) the time required to make a round-trip and (2) the relationship between time spent field processing and increase in the utility of the transported load as the two critical factors determining what parts of resources are likely to be returned to a residential camp

Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

Recent academic interest in the African diaspora stems from the intersection of studies on globalization, critical race studies and other theoretical models. The list of prominent theorists who use the terms of non-linear dynamical systems is quite extraordinary, ranging from Appadurai to Gilroy to Glissant even if the language is not always used in coherent ways. Having formulated a theoretical lens which intertwines post-colonial, globalization theory, and African American literary studies with the language of physics, my dissertation offers a new perspective on Glissant and Gilroy's ideas on the Black Atlantic and \"chaos-monde\". My project develops the methodology of complex systems, which originated in theoretical physics and biology and is now a fundamental aspect of informatics, cognitive science, and many data mining approaches, in relation to the cultural system of the African diaspora. By examining the models of resistance offered within the diaspora, newly emerging sites and their quick (and sometimes unfortunate) commodification, I offer a critical approach that allows for the interaction between parts to be as \"messy\" as we find it in real life, while allowing for a relatively \"clean\" overview. In the four chapters of my dissertation, I explore the theoretical system offered by complexity and chaos in order to offer a new perspective on our own cultural mappings through theory as well as the form and content of the African diaspora. In particular, I focus on the African American and Afro-German populations. Chapters one and three develop this theoretical frame and place complex adaptive systems theory as a linguistic device and model into dialogue with contemporary theories which inflect our conception of the diaspora. In chapter three, I also utilize contemporary queer theory and Edward Soja's model of Thirdspace as a way of interrogating space and time in ways not often done within diaspora theory. The second and fourth chapters primarily analyze cultural texts through the theoretical frame suggested by complex adaptive systems. While the second chapter is primarily literary, the fourth chapter utilizes computer data mining techniques in order to study the linguistic basis of the Afro-German population.

Found primarily in Utah north of the Colorado River, Fremont archaeological sites include pithouse villages and rancherías, adobewalled granaries and pueblos, masonry structures, and distinctive regional styles of pottery, rock art, ground stone, and projectile points. Figure 5.1 shows the approximate locations of several dozen excavated sites which have played important roles in interpretations of Fremont lifeways. Most assemblages date to between AD 600 and 1400 (Aikens 1966; Jennings 1978; Madsen 1989; Marwitt 1986; Massimino and Metcalfe 1999; Talbot and Wilde 1989). The people who produced these assemblages cultivated maize and were contemporary with Basketmaker and Puebloan farming cultures in

This paper presents a pair of models of the storage of maize. One is directly based on standard financial models of portfolio choice. Rather than optimally balancing a financial portfolio by choosing from a variety of financial instruments, our agents optimize holdings of maize by choosing from a variety of storage locations. Agents face a tradeoff between the effort of transporting maize to high elevation granaries versus the safety they offer from theft. The second model uses a multi-period framework to look at the costs and benefits of building a granary in the first place. We use our models to extract a perceived probability of maize theft by outsiders among the Fremont Indians that lived in Eastern Utah roughly 1000 - 700 years ago. We base our estimates on the caloric content of maize, the caloric cost of transporting it to granaries high above the valley floor where the maize was grown, and the costs of building and maintaining them. Our calculations show that a fairly low level of risk, on the order of 5% to 20%, could easily rationalize the use of cliffside granaries.