PRODUCTION, EXCHANGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION IN THE GREEN RIVER REGION OF WESTERN KENTUCKY: A MULTISCALAR APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF TWO SHELL MIDDEN SITES

The Green River region of western Kentucky has been a focus of Archaic period research since 1915. Currently, the region is playing an important role in discussions of Archaic hunter-gatherer cultural complexity. Unfortunately, many of the larger Green River sites contain several archaeological components ranging from the Early to Late Archaic periods. Understanding culture change requires that these multiple components somehow be sorted and addressed individually. Detailed re-analyses of Works Progress Administration (WPA) era artifact collections from two archaeological sites in the Green River region – the Baker (15Mu12) and Chiggerville (15Oh1) shell middens – indicate that these sites are relatively isolated Middle and Late Archaic components, respectively. The relatively unmixed character of Baker and Chiggerville makes these sites excellent candidates for evaluating aspects of complexity during the Archaic. After developing a theoretical basis for evaluating the relative complexity of the social organization of the Baker and Chiggerville site inhabitants on the basis of the material record they left behind, I employ detailed analyses of the bone, antler, and stone tools from these two sites to examine six microscalar aspects of complexity – technological organization, subsistence, specialization, leadership, communication networks, and exchange. These microscalar aspects of complexity all can be linked materially to the archaeological record of the Green River region and can be evaluated as proxies for changes in social organization among the hunter-gatherers who inhabited this region during the Middle and Late Archaic periods. Although the Baker assemblage indicated greater complexity in communication networks and certain proxies for leadership and technological organization, most indicators suggest that the Chiggerville site inhabitants were the more complexly organized group and were in the process of developing a tribal-like social formation. This research, therefore, tentatively supports the hypothesis of increasing complexity through time during the Archaic. However, marked differences in the technological strategies utilized by the Baker and Chiggerville site inhabitants indicates these groups may not have been historically related, thereby violating one of the primary assumptions of the project. If this alternative hypothesis is confirmed through additional research, then no conclusions concerning change through time can be derived from this study

Quantifying and mitigating bias in inference on gravitational wave source populations

When using incorrect or inaccurate signal models to perform parameter estimation on a gravitational wave signal, biased parameter estimates will in general be obtained. For a single event this bias may be consistent with the posterior, but when considering a population of events this bias becomes evident as a sag below the expected diagonal line of the P-P plot showing the fraction of signals found within a certain significance level versus that significance level. It would be hoped that recently proposed techniques for accounting for model uncertainties in parameter estimation would, to some extent, alleviate this problem. Here we demonstrate that this is indeed the case. We derive an analytic approximation to the P-P plot obtained when using an incorrect signal model to perform parameter estimation. This approximation is valid in the limit of high signal-to-noise ratio and nearly correct waveform models. We show how the P-P plot changes if a Gaussian process likelihood that allows for model errors is used to analyse the data. We demonstrate analytically and using numerical simulations that the bias is always reduced in this way. These results provide a way to quantify bias in inference on populations and demonstrate the importance of utilising methods to mitigate this bias.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Phys. Rev. D; v2 includes minor changes for consistency with accepted versio

Testing the "no-hair" property of black holes with X-ray observations of accretion disks

Accretion disks around black holes radiate a significant fraction of the rest mass of the accreting material in the form of thermal radiation from within a few gravitational radii of the black hole ($r \lesssim 20 G M / c^{2}$). In addition, the accreting matter may also be illuminated by hard X-rays from the surrounding plasma which adds fluorescent transition lines to the emission. This radiation is emitted by matter moving along geodesics in the metric, therefore the strong Doppler and gravitational redshifts observed in the emission encode information about the strong gravitational field around the black hole. In this paper the possibility of using the X-ray emission as a strong field test of General Relativity is explored by calculating the spectra for both the transition line and thermal emission from a thin accretion disk in a series of parametrically deformed Kerr metrics. In addition the possibility of constraining a number of known black hole spacetimes in alternative theories of gravity is considered.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Recent Investigations of Mission Period Activity on Sapelo Island, Georgia

Prior to their retreat to Florida in 1684, Muskogean-speaking Guale Indians inhabited much of what is now the Georgia coast. The arrival of Spanish missionaries in Florida and Georgia in the mid-1500s began what is known archaeologically as the mission period (1568-1684), a time of sustained interaction between the Spanish and the Guale people. Over time, population loss due to European-introduced diseases and conflict with English-backed Native American slave raiders resulted in a drastic reconfiguration of Guale society and the abandonment of the Guale\u27s ancestral homeland (Worth 2007). Sapelo Island (Figure 6.1) is the site of at least one Spanish mission, the Mission San Joseph de Sapala (Worth 2007:194). Ethnohistoric data indicate that this mission played a critical role in the story of Guale culture change, serving as an aggregation point for other Guale towns that were forced to relocate after attacks by slave raiders and pirates. Of particular interest is the period from ca. 1660 to 1684, when extensive demographic shuffling and relocation led to the mixing of many formerly separate Native American social entities and the emergence of the Yamassee, a newly formed but culturally distinct sociopolitical group made up of individuals from several collapsed chiefdoms (Saunders 2001; Worth 2004a, 2004b)