Survey, Excavation, and Geophysics at Songjiaheba—A Small Bronze Age Site in the Chengdu Plain

The Chengdu 成都 Plain, in the northwest corner of the Sichuan 四川Basin (Figure 1), was the setting for the emergence of a complex civilization in the second millennium BC. This civilization is most notably associated with the site of Sanxingdui 三星堆, in Guanghan 廣漢, where two sacrificial pits discovered in 1986 revealed a rich and unexpected collection of jade objects, ceramics, elephant tusks, and elaborate bronze and gold objects (Bagley 2001; Flad 2012; Sichuan 1999). The discovery of the Sanxingdui pits was followed by research at other sites in the Chengdu Plain, including several loci in the city of Chengdu that post-date Sanxingdui, such as an elite residential location called Shi’erqiao 十二橋 (Sichuan et al. 1987; Jiang 1998), a zone of ritual deposits, cemeteries, and settlement areas named Jinsha 金沙 (Chengdu Institute 2006; Chengdu & Beijing 2002; Zhu et al. 2003), and Shangyejie 商業街, a Late Bronze Age elite burial site with large log coffins filled with lacquers and other elite objects (Chengdu 2002). Based on the excavations of these sites, we now know that bronze-producing communities that commanded multi-community networks of resource acquisition existed in the 2 Chengdu Plain starting at least as early as the middle of the second millennium BC (Flad and Chen 2013).Anthropolog

Northwest Native Plants: A Digital Space for Paleoethnobotanical Knowledges and Biocultural Heritage

Biocultural heritage preservation relies on ethnobotanical knowledge and the paleoethnobotanical data used in (re)constructing histories of human–biota interactions. Biocultural heritage, defined as the knowledge and practices of Indigenous and local peoples and their biological relatives, is often guarded information, meant for specific audiences and withheld from other social circles. As such, these forms of heritage and knowledge must also be included in the ongoing data sovereignty discussions and movement. In this paper we share the process and design decisions behind creating an online database for ethnobotanical knowledge and associated paleoethnobotanical data, using a content management system designed to foreground Indigenous and local perspectives. Our main purpose is to suggest that the Mukurtu content management system, originally designed for physical items of cultural importance, be considered as a potential tool for digitizing and ethically circulating biocultural heritage, including paleoethnobotanical resources. With this database, we aim to create access to biocultural heritage and paleoethnobotanical considerations for a variety of audiences while also respecting the protected and sensitive natures of Indigenous and local knowledges

Northwest Native Plants: A Digital Space for Paleoethnobotanical Knowledges and Biocultural Heritage

Biocultural heritage preservation relies on ethnobotanical knowledge and the paleoethnobotanical data used in (re)constructing histories of human–biota interactions. Biocultural heritage, defined as the knowledge and practices of Indigenous and local peoples and their biological relatives, is often guarded information, meant for specific audiences and withheld from other social circles. As such, these forms of heritage and knowledge must also be included in the ongoing data sovereignty discussions and movement. In this paper we share the process and design decisions behind creating an online database for ethnobotanical knowledge and associated paleoethnobotanical data, using a content management system designed to foreground Indigenous and local perspectives. Our main purpose is to suggest that the Mukurtu content management system, originally designed for physical items of cultural importance, be considered as a potential tool for digitizing and ethically circulating biocultural heritage, including paleoethnobotanical resources. With this database, we aim to create access to biocultural heritage and paleoethnobotanical considerations for a variety of audiences while also respecting the protected and sensitive natures of Indigenous and local knowledges

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution

Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years. We find that sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. We thus define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed facilitates additional growth in scale. Polities diverge in socio-political features below the Information Threshold, but reconverge beyond it. We suggest an explanation for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities based on phased growth in scale and information processing. We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes