Public Archaeology in the National Park Service: A Brief Overview and Case Study

Archaeologists are integral in National Park Service (NPS) culture. Some archaeologists “wear the hat” and the authoritative uniform symbolizing the park service, yet non–park service archaeologists can work at the parks with research permits under the Archaeological Resource Protection Act of 1979 (ARPA permits [Neumann et al. 2010]) or with a cultural resource contract award. Both endeavors provide information to help individual parks meet their management and interpretative goals. An added benefit for these archaeologists is working at some of the country's most beautiful, always intriguing, and often endangered archaeological sites. NPS cultural resources range from southwestern pueblos to Revolutionary battlefields, urban historic sites, and coastal lighthouses. Most national parks contain spaces and places with varied, large, and vocal constituencies, including archaeologists. To promote, regulate, conserve, preserve, and certify public enjoyment—these ideas reverberate a century after the park service's founding and are detailed in its national strategies (Everhart 1983; NPS 2011). A brief review of NPS history and of some of its leaders illustrates how archaeologists influenced this often-romanticized public organization. An example of how interdisciplinary archaeological research works at a national park follows that discussion

Multidisciplinary Landscape Research at Tannenbaum Historic Park, Guilford County, North Carolina

Interdisciplinary research demonstrates that the extant Hoskins log cabin (31GF413**), at Tannenbaum Historic Park in Greensboro, North Carolina, is located on or near an eighteenth-century house site. The Park is part of the Guilford Courthouse Battlefield National Historic Landmark and is believed to be the location where General Cornwallis formed the first British line of attack which proceeded into the current Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. Archaeology and Geography faculty and students from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro used a landscape perspective, geographic information systems, and historical archaeology to explore the occupation of this farm from the American Revolution to the present

Blue Beads as African-American Cultural Symbols

Blue beads are consistent finds at African-American sites. Archaeologists acknowledge these artifacts were used for adornment, yet some researchers also propose beads pos sessed additional cultural meaning among African Ameri cans. For this study bead data from African-American sites in the South are analyzed. The results indicate blue is the predominant bead color. The prevalence of these items sug gests they may indeed have been an important yet unrecog nized aspect of African-American culture. The multiple un derlying meanings assigned to blue beads are considered through reference to ethnographic information, folklore, and oral histor

Social Inequality and Turn-of-the-Century Farmsteads: Issues of Class, Status, Ethnicity, and Race

The following epistemological exploration provides a framework for analyzing the social stratification of one Upland South community in North Carolina from about A.D. 1900 to 1940. Specific examples derive from a rural, crossroads community, while the analysis of the relationship between material culture and agrarian life is provided through the survey and excavation of two Piedmont farms. Each farm was inhabited by two generations of their respective families. One family was black, the other white, and both owned their small farms. Members of these adjacent farm steads were connected by a web of social and economic interactions. Institutionalized racism was superseded, in part, by a shared sense of rural community

A Brief and True Account of the History of South Carolina Plantation Archaeology and the Archaeologists Who Practice It

This paper’s genesis is the perception that archaeologists’ communal memory of the early days of South Carolina plantation archaeology is fading, incomplete or at times overly judgmental. In order to combat this loss, some of the projects, processes and theoretical orientations that affected South Carolina’s plantation studies are explored. Examples of influential forces are the growth of Cultural Research Management (CRM), burgeoning museum and university programs in historical archaeology, and initially the Tricentennial and Bicentennial. Early references have been searched, including much of the "grey literature" and archaeologists and administrators in academia, government and private industry have been interviewed. Interview topics include early theoretical perspectives and how they relate to field and laboratory methods. Statistical methods have not been used in this study; results are interpretive and qualitative rather than quantitative. Instead, examples have been drawn from the literature of the period to illustrate trends in early South Carolina plantation archaeology

The Human Connectome Project: A retrospective

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) was launched in 2010 as an ambitious effort to accelerate advances in human neuroimaging, particularly for measures of brain connectivity; apply these advances to study a large number of healthy young adults; and freely share the data and tools with the scientific community. NIH awarded grants to two consortia; this retrospective focuses on the “WU-Minn-Ox” HCP consortium centered at Washington University, the University of Minnesota, and University of Oxford. In just over 6 years, the WU-Minn-Ox consortium succeeded in its core objectives by: 1) improving MR scanner hardware, pulse sequence design, and image reconstruction methods, 2) acquiring and analyzing multimodal MRI and MEG data of unprecedented quality together with behavioral measures from more than 1100 HCP participants, and 3) freely sharing the data (via the ConnectomeDB database) and associated analysis and visualization tools. To date, more than 27 Petabytes of data have been shared, and 1538 papers acknowledging HCP data use have been published. The “HCP-style” neuroimaging paradigm has emerged as a set of best-practice strategies for optimizing data acquisition and analysis. This article reviews the history of the HCP, including comments on key events and decisions associated with major project components. We discuss several scientific advances using HCP data, including improved cortical parcellations, analyses of connectivity based on functional and diffusion MRI, and analyses of brain-behavior relationships. We also touch upon our efforts to develop and share a variety of associated data processing and analysis tools along with detailed documentation, tutorials, and an educational course to train the next generation of neuroimagers. We conclude with a look forward at opportunities and challenges facing the human neuroimaging field from the perspective of the HCP consortium

Variation in Structure and Process of Care in Traumatic Brain Injury: Provider Profiles of European Neurotrauma Centers Participating in the CENTER-TBI Study.

INTRODUCTION: The strength of evidence underpinning care and treatment recommendations in traumatic brain injury (TBI) is low. Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has been proposed as a framework to provide evidence for optimal care for TBI patients. The first step in CER is to map the existing variation. The aim of current study is to quantify variation in general structural and process characteristics among centers participating in the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in Traumatic Brain Injury (CENTER-TBI) study. METHODS: We designed a set of 11 provider profiling questionnaires with 321 questions about various aspects of TBI care, chosen based on literature and expert opinion. After pilot testing, questionnaires were disseminated to 71 centers from 20 countries participating in the CENTER-TBI study. Reliability of questionnaires was estimated by calculating a concordance rate among 5% duplicate questions. RESULTS: All 71 centers completed the questionnaires. Median concordance rate among duplicate questions was 0.85. The majority of centers were academic hospitals (n = 65, 92%), designated as a level I trauma center (n = 48, 68%) and situated in an urban location (n = 70, 99%). The availability of facilities for neuro-trauma care varied across centers; e.g. 40 (57%) had a dedicated neuro-intensive care unit (ICU), 36 (51%) had an in-hospital rehabilitation unit and the organization of the ICU was closed in 64% (n = 45) of the centers. In addition, we found wide variation in processes of care, such as the ICU admission policy and intracranial pressure monitoring policy among centers. CONCLUSION: Even among high-volume, specialized neurotrauma centers there is substantial variation in structures and processes of TBI care. This variation provides an opportunity to study effectiveness of specific aspects of TBI care and to identify best practices with CER approaches

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Stroke genetics informs drug discovery and risk prediction across ancestries

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of stroke — the second leading cause of death worldwide — were conducted predominantly in populations of European ancestry1,2. Here, in cross-ancestry GWAS meta-analyses of 110,182 patients who have had a stroke (five ancestries, 33% non-European) and 1,503,898 control individuals, we identify association signals for stroke and its subtypes at 89 (61 new) independent loci: 60 in primary inverse-variance-weighted analyses and 29 in secondary meta-regression and multitrait analyses. On the basis of internal cross-ancestry validation and an independent follow-up in 89,084 additional cases of stroke (30% non-European) and 1,013,843 control individuals, 87% of the primary stroke risk loci and 60% of the secondary stroke risk loci were replicated (P < 0.05). Effect sizes were highly correlated across ancestries. Cross-ancestry fine-mapping, in silico mutagenesis analysis3, and transcriptome-wide and proteome-wide association analyses revealed putative causal genes (such as SH3PXD2A and FURIN) and variants (such as at GRK5 and NOS3). Using a three-pronged approach4, we provide genetic evidence for putative drug effects, highlighting F11, KLKB1, PROC, GP1BA, LAMC2 and VCAM1 as possible targets, with drugs already under investigation for stroke for F11 and PROC. A polygenic score integrating cross-ancestry and ancestry-specific stroke GWASs with vascular-risk factor GWASs (integrative polygenic scores) strongly predicted ischaemic stroke in populations of European, East Asian and African ancestry5. Stroke genetic risk scores were predictive of ischaemic stroke independent of clinical risk factors in 52,600 clinical-trial participants with cardiometabolic disease. Our results provide insights to inform biology, reveal potential drug targets and derive genetic risk prediction tools across ancestries