Excavating Gender: The Embodiment and (Re)presentation of Social Relations in Mierzanowice Communities of the Early Bronze Age

The construction of gender in a society is based on a discursive relationship between culture and biology. Ideological components are often translated into structural factors, which condition access to social and biological resources and exposure to risk. Cumulative differential health outcomes for groups can become embodied in ways that affect the skeleton. By conducting population-level analyses of skeletal markers of health and trauma, bioarchaeologists work backwards to attempt to reconstruct social conditions. Archaeological and mortuary context is an important part of this process. Cemeteries of the Mierzanowice Culture (MC) in southern Poland (2300-1600 BCE) offer a unique opportunity to study gender in prehistory. Burials in these cemeteries have been described as “bipolar” in orientation, with males and females aligned to opposite points of the compass in mirror-image poses. This study seeks to understand whether the apparent, idealized gender distinctions in MC communities became gender stratification in practice, and whether indeed these distinctions are as binary as they may first appear. The excavated portions of four MC cemeteries in southeastern Poland were examined, for a sample size of 178 individuals. In addition to sex and age estimation, data were gathered pertaining to biomechanical stresses (entheseal robusticity, osteoarthritis), signs of chronic disease or nutritional insufficiency, and trauma. Results suggest that gender was at least not the primary factor with regard to the intensity of habitual labor, nor were divisions of labor so distinct that they could be clearly ascertained through patterns of entheseal robusticity. Patterns of trauma, however, suggest that while males may have experienced more occupational or accidental injuries, young adult females experienced higher rates of interpersonal violence. Finally, examination of mortuary context and anthropological data preliminarily supports the interpretation of a more nuanced approach to gender in MC communities than a static gender binary, including changes in gender roles or possibilities over the life course and potential gender variant categories (e.g., third genders or gender variants)

Evaluation of Working Capacity for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE) For Highway Construction in Kentucky, FY 2004 Update

The Kentucky Transportation Center gathered the appropriate information, performed a series of computations and analyses, prepared the attached documentation, and makes the following recommendations to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet for their DBE goal for Federal Fiscal year 2004 (October 1, 2003 - September 30, 2004). KTC recommends an overall DBE goal of 9.26%, of which 1.931% is anticipated to be satisfied by race/gender neutral prime contracts, and the resultant 7.33% should established as race/gender conscious subcontracts. The overall DBE goal figures stated here addresses an adjustment of 1.326% for the positive historical goal variance observed for the past eight years

Procedures for Determining a Working Capacity for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE) for Highway Construction and Consulting Projects in Kentucky

This report documents the working capacity of the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) community performing on federal aid highway projects over the last four federal fiscal years 1995- 98. This includes the work performed by Minority Business Enterprises (MBE), Minority Women Business Enterprises (MWBE) , and Women Business Enterprises (WBE) construction firms serving both as a prime contractors and subcontractors. The work of DBE design consultants was not included as part of this study. The impact of five DBE firms who should be graduating from the program is also discussed. In addition several different scenarios are discussed relating to the adjustment of the current DBE federal goal, and to identify if the DBE community will be able to perform the adjusted volume of work in fiscal year 2000 if the current goal is reduced

Taste-Changing in Staggered Quarks

We present results from a systematic perturbative investigation of taste-changing in improved staggered quarks. We show one-loop taste-changing interactions can be removed perturbatively by an effective four-quark term and calculate the necessary coefficients.Comment: 3 pages using espcrc2.sty and amsmath.sty, 1 Feynman diagram using feynmp.sty for Lattice2002(improve