Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche

Persistent differences in wealth and power among prehispanic Pueblo societies are visible from the late AD 800s through the late 1200s, after which large portions of the northern US Southwest were depopulated. In this paper we measure these differences in wealth using Gini coefficients based on house size, and show that high Ginis (large wealth differences) are positively related to persistence in settlements and inversely related to an annual measure of the size of the unoccupied dry-farming niche. We argue that wealth inequality in this record is due first to processes inherent in village life which have internally different distributions of the most productive maize fields, exacerbated by the dynamics of systems of balanced reciprocity; and second to decreasing ability to escape village life owing to shrinking availability of unoccupied places within the maize dry-farming niche as villages get enmeshed in regional systems of tribute or taxation. We embed this analytical reconstruction in the model of an ‘Abrupt imposition of Malthusian equilibrium in a natural-fertility, agrarian society’ proposed by Puleston et al. (Puleston C, Tuljapurkar S, Winterhalder B. 2014 PLoS ONE 9, e87541 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087541)), but show that the transition to Malthusian dynamics in this area is not abrupt but extends over centuriesThis article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’

p3k14c, a synthetic global database of archaeological radiocarbon dates.

Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecology and the evolution of social-ecological systems across the Earth. However, these databases have been developed using different sample selection criteria, which has resulted in interoperability issues for global-scale, comparative paleo-demographic research and integration with paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental data. We present a synthetic, global-scale archaeological radiocarbon database composed of 180,070 radiocarbon dates that have been cleaned according to a standardized sample selection criteria. This database increases the reusability of archaeological radiocarbon data and streamlines quality control assessments for various types of paleo-demographic research. As part of an assessment of data quality, we conduct two analyses of sampling bias in the global database at multiple scales. This database is ideal for paleo-demographic research focused on dates-as-data, bayesian modeling, or summed probability distribution methodologies

Open science in archaeology

No abstract available

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

bocinsky/asian_niche: Setting up Zenodo archiving

This is a pre-release version of the code supporting d'Alpoim Guedes, Jade and R. Kyle Bocinsky. Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia. Submitted to Nature

VEPI_data.zip

These are the data used in the Village Ecodynamics Project "Village" computer simulation of ancestral Pueblo farming families in southwestern Colorado. These data confirm to the VEP I study area. Any site location data has been scrubbed

ropensci/FedData: FedData version 2.4.6 CRAN release

This is the FedData version 2.4.6 CRAN release, and the first release as part of ROpenSci. For documentation, see http://ropensci.github.io/FedData

13. Crises as Opportunities for Culture Change

In 1927, prominent southwestern archaeologist A.V. Kidder invited some three dozen archaeologists and a few other scientists, accompanied by assorted family members, to meet at Pecos, New Mexico and attempt to “arrive at an understanding in regard to underlying problems, the methods of accumulating and presenting data, and (last, but in some ways most important) a standardised nomenclature for artifacts, decorative motifs, and periods of culture” (letter from Kidder to Clark Wissler [Woodbury..

Data output for: Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia, in review.

<p>The GitHub repository for this project does not contain the output<br> generated by the script—3.2 GB of compressed data. All output data is<br> available as this Zenodo archive.</p> <p>The `vignettes/` directory contains all data generated by the<br> `guedesbocinsky2018.Rmd` RMarkdown vignette:</p> <p>  - `data/raw_data` contains data downloaded from web sources for this<br>     analysis<br>   - `data/derived_data/` contains tables of the raw site chronometric<br>     data without locational information, and the modeled chronometric<br>     probability and niche information for each site.<br>   - `data/derived_data/models/` contains R data objects describing the<br>     Kriging interpolation models across the study area<br>   - `data/derived_data/recons/` contains NetCDF format raster bricks of<br>     the model output (i.e., the reconstructed crop niches)<br>   - `figures/` contains all figures output by the script, including<br>     videos of how each crop niche changes over time<br>   - `figures/site_densities/` contains figures of the estimated<br>     chronometric probability density for each site in our database<br>   - `submission/` contains all of the figures, tables, movies, and<br>     supplemental datasets included with d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky<br>     (2018)</p

CA+ Supplement from d'Alpoim Guedes et al., "A 5,500-Year Model of Changing Crop Niches on the Tibetan Plateau" (Current Anthropology, vol. 57, no. 4, p. 517)

The timing and mechanics of the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan Plateau—one of the most challenging environmental contexts on earth—is a focus of recent work and debate. Understanding the timing and spread of agriculture is basic to archaeology and history worldwide. Researchers seek evidence for the earliest, furthest, or highest occurrences of diagnostic elements. However, the Tibetan Plateau case illustrates a key flaw in current work: archaeologists have often uncritically interpreted the presence of plant domesticates at archaeological sites as being indicative of local agricultural practice. This assumption neglects the long history of food exchange on the Plateau, as elsewhere in the world, even beyond what were then the limits of agriculture. The cause is a fundamental lack of understanding of where crops could be grown in prehistory. Using a formal model of the agricultural thermal niche between the 5500 BP and the present, we argue that agricultural niches on the Tibetan Plateau were tightly constrained to lower-elevation river valleys throughout time. This pattern is confirmed by analysis of the extent of modern crop production on the Plateau. The challenges deriving from these altitudinal constraints placed on early Tibetans largely explain how and why the Tibetan economy developed in the way that it did