41 research outputs found
A Landscape Perspective on Climate-Driven Risks to Food Security: Exploring the Relationship between Climate and Social Transformation in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest
Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time
Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security
This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the “weight” of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy
YesWorkflow:A User-Oriented, Language-Independent Tool for Recovering Workflow Information from Scripts
Scientific workflow management systems offer features for composing complex
computational pipelines from modular building blocks, for executing the
resulting automated workflows, and for recording the provenance of data
products resulting from workflow runs. Despite the advantages such features
provide, many automated workflows continue to be implemented and executed
outside of scientific workflow systems due to the convenience and familiarity
of scripting languages (such as Perl, Python, R, and MATLAB), and to the high
productivity many scientists experience when using these languages. YesWorkflow
is a set of software tools that aim to provide such users of scripting
languages with many of the benefits of scientific workflow systems. YesWorkflow
requires neither the use of a workflow engine nor the overhead of adapting code
to run effectively in such a system. Instead, YesWorkflow enables scientists to
annotate existing scripts with special comments that reveal the computational
modules and dataflows otherwise implicit in these scripts. YesWorkflow tools
extract and analyze these comments, represent the scripts in terms of entities
based on the typical scientific workflow model, and provide graphical
renderings of this workflow-like view of the scripts. Future versions of
YesWorkflow also will allow the prospective provenance of the data products of
these scripts to be queried in ways similar to those available to users of
scientific workflow systems
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Settlement, Subsistence, and Society in Late Zuni Prehistory
Beginning about A.D. 1250, the Zuni area of New Mexico witnessed a massive population aggregation in which the inhabitants of hundreds of widely dispersed villages relocated to a small number of large, architectecturally planned pueblos. Over the next century, 27 of these pueblos were constructed, occupied briefly, and then abandoned. Another dramatic settlement shift occurred about A. D. 1400, when the locus of population moved west to the "Cities of Cibola" discovered by Coronado in 1540. Keith Kintigh demonstrates how changing agricultural strategies and developing mechanisms of social integration contributed to these population shifts. In particular, he argues that occupants of the earliest large pueblos relied on runoff agriculture, but that gradually spring-and river-fed irrigation systems were adopted. Resultant strengthening of the mechanisms of social integration allowed the increased occupational stability of the protohistorical Zuni towns.Preface / Zuni Prehistory / The Research Area and Sources of Data / Ceramic Chronology / Site Descriptions / Evaluation of Site Dating and Site Size Estimates / Descriptive Summary of Settlement Patterns / Zuni Area Environment and Agricultural Technology / Zuni Settlement Patterns and Social Organization / Appendix. Percentages of Ceramic Types and Wares by Site / References / IndexThis title from the Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona collection is made available by the University of Arizona Press and University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions about this title, please contact the UA Press at http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/
Letter, Keith W. Kintigh to Richard Hart, June 27, 1986
Letter about an area near the Zuni River in Apache County, Arizona; includes copy of an Arizona State Museum Zuni River survey form from 1984 and three maps
Extracting Information from Archaeological Texts
To address archaeology’s most pressing substantive challenges, researchers must discover, access,
and extract information contained in the reports and articles that codify so much of archaeology’s knowledge.
These efforts will require application of existing and emerging natural language processing technologies
to extensive digital corpora. Automated classification can enable development of metadata needed for the
discovery of relevant documents. Although it is even more technically challenging, automated extraction of
and reasoning with information from texts can provide urgently needed access to contextualized information
within documents. Effective automated translation is needed for scholars to benefit from research published
in other languages
Settlement, Subsistence, and Society in Late Zuni Prehistory
Beginning about A.D. 1250, the Zuni area of New Mexico witnessed a massive population aggregation in which the inhabitants of hundreds of widely dispersed villages relocated to a small number of large, architecturally planned pueblos. Over the next century, twenty-seven of these pueblos were constructed, occupied briefly, and then abandoned. Another dramatic settlement shift occurred about A.D. 1400, when the locus of population moved west to the “Cities of Cibola” discovered by Coronado in 1540. Keith W. Kintigh demonstrates how changing agricultural strategies and developing mechanisms of social integration contributed to these population shifts. In particular, he argues that occupants of the earliest large pueblos relied on runoff agriculture, but that gradually spring-and river-fed irrigation systems were adopted. Resultant strengthening of the mechanisms of social integration allowed the increased occupational stability of the protohistorical Zuni towns