Mardu Foraging, Food Sharing, and Gender

Among Aboriginal people in Australia\u27s deserts, as among all humans, food acquisition is not simply about eating: practices related to what types of foods are acquired, who obtains the food, how food is treated and distributed, are infused with value other than simple nutrition. Often these practices are attached to gender roles. Traditional explanations have assumed that gender differences in foraging and food sharing are bound by a common goal of provisioning--that like a mini-economy of scale, a household will be better provisioned through gender specialization. But recent work among other people that hunt and gather suggests that under some circumstances critical aspects of gender differences in labor may arise from the ways in which different strategies of food acquisition and distribution meet different foraging goals, some of which can conflict with household provisioning. This is especially the case when the activity of acquiring food can provide public goods that are distributed widely, or when food contains symbolic value beyond its simple caloric content. This research proposes to quantitatively test the predictions of hypotheses that examine factors influencing food acquisition, sharing, and their link to gender differentiation among the Mardu of Western Australia. To what extent are different (sometimes conflicting) foraging goals influencing a sexual division of labor? To what extent are Mardu foraging decisions designed to more effectively provision themselves and their households, and to what extent are they influenced by the ways that different activities can honestly signal underlying qualities of the acquirer? How do changes in household composition, environmental dynamics, and social dynamics affect male and female foraging strategies? Answering these questions will involve quantitative measures of the economics of resource patch utilization, prey selection, food transfers, and Mardu camp composition and ecology. Delineating these and how they structure subsistence decisions will have broad relevance for our understanding of basic features of human family organization in small scale economies

A History of Timber Resource Use in the Development of Cache Valley, Utah

It has long been realized that the forests and forest products contributed very significantly toward the economic development of the Western United States. However, the extent of this contribution over a relatively small area has never been fully analyzed. Therein lies the primary justification for this paper. The author hopes that the readers of this paper will, through their reading, gain some appreciation of the major role the forest and its products played in the development of the western community

Mardu Foraging, Food Sharing, and Gender

Among Aboriginal people in Australia\u27s deserts, as among all humans, food acquisition is not simply about eating: practices related to what types of foods are acquired, who obtains the food, how food is treated and distributed, are infused with value other than simple nutrition. Often these practices are attached to gender roles. Traditional explanations have assumed that gender differences in foraging and food sharing are bound by a common goal of provisioning--that like a mini-economy of scale, a household will be better provisioned through gender specialization. But recent work among other people that hunt and gather suggests that under some circumstances critical aspects of gender differences in labor may arise from the ways in which different strategies of food acquisition and distribution meet different foraging goals, some of which can conflict with household provisioning. This is especially the case when the activity of acquiring food can provide public goods that are distributed widely, or when food contains symbolic value beyond its simple caloric content. This research proposes to quantitatively test the predictions of hypotheses that examine factors influencing food acquisition, sharing, and their link to gender differentiation among the Mardu of Western Australia. To what extent are different (sometimes conflicting) foraging goals influencing a sexual division of labor? To what extent are Mardu foraging decisions designed to more effectively provision themselves and their households, and to what extent are they influenced by the ways that different activities can honestly signal underlying qualities of the acquirer? How do changes in household composition, environmental dynamics, and social dynamics affect male and female foraging strategies? Answering these questions will involve quantitative measures of the economics of resource patch utilization, prey selection, food transfers, and Mardu camp composition and ecology. Delineating these and how they structure subsistence decisions will have broad relevance for our understanding of basic features of human family organization in small scale economies

Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science

pre-printThe future of archaeological science relies as much (if not more) on theoretical as on methodological developments. As with anything in biology, explaining past human behavior will require the application of evolutionary theory. As with anything in archaeology, theory is useless without clear ties to a material record. Human behavioral ecology (HBE) has become one of the central theoretical frameworks in archaeological science by providing a broad conceptual toolkit for linking principles of natural selection to operational hypotheses about variability in behavior and its material consequences. Here we review the general approach and outline cases where applying HBE models can contribute to key research issues in archaeology. These examples illustrate how foundational applications of HBE are being built upon to explain complex and diverse phenomena ranging from the origins of agriculture to the emergence of institutionalized inequality. With each case, we outline avenues where this research strategy can advance archaeological science into the future

A land of work: foraging behavior and ecology

book chapterWork is a core theme in many of the major issues and debates in California archaeology. Work is central in understanding why the first Californians entered the region (e.g., Erlandson, this volume): how thousands of years of work following colonization resulted in the overexploitation of particular resources (e.g., Broughton 1994), the economic intensification of work effort (e.g., Basgall 1987), shifts in the patterns of population growth (e.g., Hull, this volume), changes in the currencies that drive work (e.g., Hildebrandt and McGuire, this volume), and the emergence of social hierarchies in politically complex societies (e.g., Arnold 1992, 1993). All of these were punctuated by environmental events which alter the very foundations of work (e.g., Jones and Schwitalla, this volume)

Husimi Maps in Lattices

We build upon previous work that used coherent states as a measurement of the local phase space and extended the flux operator by adapting the Husimi projection to produce a vector field called the Husimi map. In this article, we extend its definition from continuous systems to lattices. This requires making several adjustments to incorporate effects such as group velocity and multiple bands. Several phenomena which uniquely occur in lattice systems, like group-velocity warping and internal Bragg diffraction, are explained and demonstrated using Husimi maps. We also show that scattering points between bands and valleys can be identified in the divergence of the Husimi map