Chapter Eight: Ethnoarchaeology of Foraging and the Case of Vanishing Agriculturalists in the Amazon Basin

Debates about ancient Amazonian social organization have evaluated characterizations from a range of sources that include ethnographically documented foraging societies and archaeological discoveries suggestive of sedentized agriculturists. This study uses qualitative ethnoarchaeological data about foraging and small-scale horticulture among the Pumé of Venezuela, and Lewis Binford’s quantified database of foraging groups and environmental parameters, to develop a testable model that predicts the conditions under which Amazon Basin foragers would (or would not) intensify subsistence to the point of incorporating maize and other cultivars; as well as the conditions for reversing the process. Specific expectations for the archaeological and paleoenvironmental record are proposed as indicators, and assessed relative to what we currently know from the archaeological record

Wild, Tame, and In-Between: Traditional Agricultural Knowledge of Taiwan Indigenous People

Many of us would agree that Senator J. William Fulbright’s vision of “a world with a little more knowledge and a little less conflict” will feature healthy ecosystems, appreciation of cultural diversity, and of course, delicious food. However, the world has been moving in the wrong direction over the past century. Today, 75% of the world’s plant food is made up of only 12 species. As of 2010, three (rice, maize, and wheat) provided nearly 60 percent of the calories and proteins that humans derive from plants (F.A.O 2010, 1999) and this trend continues (Khoury et al. 2014). This dramatic impact on the world’s agro-biodiversity is accompanied by accelerating environmental degradation, the loss of diverse cultural understandings and appreciation of food, and an increasingly bland globalized menu – one that isn’t even very healthy

Tempo and Mode of Neolithic Crop Adoption by Palaeolithic Hunter-Gatherers of Taiwan: Ethno-Archaeological and Behavioural Ecology Perspectives

Archaeological evidence from the Early Taiwan Neolithic facilitates the development and assessment of predictive statements about habitat-related variance in the initial adoption of agriculture. This paper summarises archaeological research about Taiwan’s terminal Palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods, and derives working expectations from human behavioural ecology models of diet breadth, opportunity cost, and future discounting, as well as ethno-archaeological research. Expectations are evaluated using Lewis Binford’s hunter-gatherer database. Results allow for the prediction that selective forces during the Neolithic transition of Taiwan favoured mixed economies that varied according to the properties of the local habitat, the social and subsistence organisation of hunter- gatherer groups, and the degree and timing of exposure to immigrating farmers: 1. Coastal plains of the west and the lacustrine basins of the north were ideal zones for initial colonisation by Neolithic Southeastern Chinese farmers. Land pressure and resource competition from immigrants would decrease the costs of crop adoption from the hunter-gatherers’ perspective, and personal encounters and transfer of cultivation knowledge were direct and continuous. 2. Wild resources maintained higher values on the east coast, where hunter-gatherer populations were supported by aquatic resources, and the mountainous interior where mobile hunting predominated. Flatlands suitable for farming are scarce in these zones. Future discounting, opportunity costs, and marginal value models predict that hunter-gatherers of the east coast and mountains delayed the full adoption of cultivation practices. This result may be tested using archaeological data and is relevant for other sub-tropical island agricultural adoption

How Taiwanese Death Rituals Have Adapted for Families Living in the US

Taiwanese people living in the United States face a dilemma when loved ones die. Many families worry that they might not be able to carry out proper rituals in their new homeland. As a biracial Taiwanese-American archaeologist living in Idaho and studying in Taiwan, I am discovering the many faces of Taiwan’s blended cultural heritage drawn from the mix of peoples that have inhabited the island over millennia

Modeling Incipient Use of Neolithic Cultigens by Taiwanese Foragers: Perspectives from Niche Variation Theory, the Prey Choice Model, and the Ideal Free Distribution

The earliest evidence for agriculture in Taiwan dates to about 6000 years BP and indicates that farmer-gardeners from Southeast China migrated across the Taiwan Strait. However, little is known about the adaptive interactions between Taiwanese foragers and Neolithic Chinese farmers during the transition. This paper considers theoretical expectations from human behavioral ecology based models and macroecological patterning from Binford’s hunter-gatherer database to scope the range of responses of native populations to invasive dispersal. Niche variation theory and invasion theory predict that the foraging niche breadths will narrow for native populations and morphologically similar dispersing populations. The encounter contingent prey choice model indicates that groups under resource depression from depleted high-ranked resources will increasingly take low-ranked resources upon encounter. The ideal free distribution with Allee effects categorizes settlement into highly ranked habitats selected on the basis of encounter rates with preferred prey, with niche construction potentially contributing to an upswing in some highly ranked prey species. In coastal plain habitats preferred by farming immigrants, interactions and competition either reduced encounter rates with high ranked prey or were offset by benefits to habitat from the creation of a mosaic of succession ecozones by cultivation. Aquatic-focused foragers were eventually constrained to broaden subsistence by increasing the harvest of low ranked resources, then mobility-compatible Neolithic cultigens were added as a niche-broadening tactic. In locations less suitable for farming, fishing and hunting continued as primary foraging tactics for centuries after Neolithic arrivals. The paper concludes with a set of evidence-based archaeological expectations derived from these models

More is simpler : effectively and efficiently assessing node-pair similarities based on hyperlinks

Similarity assessment is one of the core tasks in hyperlink analysis. Recently, with the proliferation of applications, e.g., web search and collaborative filtering, SimRank has been a well-studied measure of similarity between two nodes in a graph. It recursively follows the philosophy that "two nodes are similar if they are referenced (have incoming edges) from similar nodes", which can be viewed as an aggregation of similarities based on incoming paths. Despite its popularity, SimRank has an undesirable property, i.e., "zero-similarity": It only accommodates paths with equal length from a common "center" node. Thus, a large portion of other paths are fully ignored. This paper attempts to remedy this issue. (1) We propose and rigorously justify SimRank*, a revised version of SimRank, which resolves such counter-intuitive "zero-similarity" issues while inheriting merits of the basic SimRank philosophy. (2) We show that the series form of SimRank* can be reduced to a fairly succinct and elegant closed form, which looks even simpler than SimRank, yet enriches semantics without suffering from increased computational cost. This leads to a fixed-point iterative paradigm of SimRank* in O(Knm) time on a graph of n nodes and m edges for K iterations, which is comparable to SimRank. (3) To further optimize SimRank* computation, we leverage a novel clustering strategy via edge concentration. Due to its NP-hardness, we devise an efficient and effective heuristic to speed up SimRank* computation to O(Knm) time, where m is generally much smaller than m. (4) Using real and synthetic data, we empirically verify the rich semantics of SimRank*, and demonstrate its high computation efficiency