Browsing Anthropology by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 64
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A Future History of Water
(2019) -
A taphonomic analysis of PTK (Bed I, Olduvai Gorge) and its bearing on the interpretation of the dietary and eco-spatial behaviors of early humans
(2023)Here, we present a thorough taphonomic analysis of the 1.84 million-year-old site of Phillip Tobias Korongo (PTK), Bed I, Olduvai Gorge. PTK is one of the new archaeological sites documented on the FLK Zinj paleolandscape, in which FLK 22 level was deposited and covered by Tuff IC. Therefore, PTK is pene-contemporary with these sites: FLK Zinj, DS, ... -
Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico
(2016)The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as ... -
Aeolian politics
(2015)Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly ... -
After war
(2016)In the United States – as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine – the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers’ bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of ‘rehabilitation’. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and ... -
Anthropocene Unseen : A Lexicon
(2020)The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from ... -
Anthropocenic Ecoauthority: The Winds of Oaxaca
(2014)This article analyzes the development of wind parks across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) and, in turn, how a politics of resistance and local perceptions of environmental peril have challenged renewable energy transitions. In the fraught debates surrounding the massive Mareña Renovables wind park, dramatic distinctions have emerged ... -
Anthropologies of ethics: Where we've been, where we are, where we might go
(2014)Comment on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
(2017)As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for ... -
Chemical analysis of glass beads from Igbo Olokun, Ile-Ife (SW Nigeria): New light on raw materials, production, and interregional interactions
(2018)The site of Igbo Olokun on the northern periphery of Ile-Ife has been recognized as a glass-working workshop for over a century. Its glass-encrusted crucibles and beads were viewed as evidence of secondary processing of imported glass until the high lime, high alumina (HLHA) composition of the glass was recognized as unique to the region. Archaeological ... -
Coins in Context: Local Economy, Value and Practice on the East African Swahili Coast
(2012-02)Coinage occupies an unusual position in archaeological research. Thriving scholarship on numismatics and monetary history ensures that the objects themselves are well-studied, often seen as an indication of chronology and of stylistic and commercial links. Yet coins might also be analysed as artefacts, and explored as part of the symbolic world ... -
Collagen fingerprinting traces the introduction of caprines to island Eastern Africa
(2021)The human colonization of eastern Africa's near- and offshore islands was accompanied by the translocation of several domestic, wild and commensal fauna, many of which had long-term impacts on local environments. To better understand the timing and nature of the introduction of domesticated caprines (sheep and goat) to these islands, this study applied ... -
Computer vision supports primary access to meat by early Homo 1.84 million years ago
(2022)Human carnivory is atypical among primates. Unlike chimpanzees and bonobos, who are known to hunt smaller monkeys and eat them immediately, human foragers often cooperate to kill large animals and transport them to a safe location to be shared. While it is known that meat became an important part of the hominin diet around 2.6–2 Mya, whether intense ... -
Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
(2022)This comparative study of community organizations serving marginalized youth in New York City and Amsterdam utilized a novel ethnographic approach called reverse engineering to identify techniques for social change that are active in each organization, adaptable and translatable to other contexts. It found that youth-serving organizations led flexible ... -
Cooperation and Co-optation in Transnational Activism
(2010)Cooperation and co-optation, despite their shared prefixes, seem to suggest very different approaches to establishing coalitions, politics and sociality. Where cooperation suggests prioritizing collective knowledge - shared ways of thinking, being and doing - co-optation is often understood as a kind of political thievery, usurping the politics, ... -
A deposit of Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara, Tanzania
(2014)A deposit of coins was recovered during excavations at Songo Mnara, Tanzania, containing over 300 copper Kilwa-type coins. This is the first deposit or hoard of these coins found in a well defined archaeological context and it therefore offers a unique glimpse into both the typology of these coins and their contemporary uses. The ramifications of the ... -
Developments in Rural Life on the Eastern African Coast, A.D. 700–1500
(2018)The eastern African coast is known for its Swahili “stonetowns.” Archaeological study of stonetowns has overshadowed that of Swahili rural life, and how it reformulated in the context of urban transformations after A.D. 1000. To help redress that imbalance, we focus here on village research carried out in a Swahili heartland—Pemba Island, Tanzania—in ... -
Diet, economy, and culinary practices at the height of precolonial Swahili urbanism
(2022)Swahili cuisine is known across Africa and globally as a highly distinctive product of a cosmopolitan, coastal, urban society. Here we present a comprehensive study of precolonial Swahili diet and culinary practices at the coastal town of Songo Mnara, positioning archaeological and ethnographic understandings of cuisine in a long-term coastal tradition. ...
