EVIDENCE FOR SIGNIFICANT SUBTERRANEAN STORAGE AT TWO HUNTER-GATHERER SITES: THE PRESENCE OF A MAST-BASED ECONOMY IN THE LATE ARCHAIC COASTAL AMERICAN SOUTHEAST

2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Sanger

Excavations at two Late Archaic shell rings on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, revealed evidence of significant amounts of subterranean storage. Based on botanical evidence, ethonographic analogies, and interpretations of other Late Archaic sites, hickory nuts and acorns are the most likely resource being stored, and quantifying the capacity found at each ring highlights the prevalence and importance of mast storage. These findings are important because large-scale storage has rarely been proposed for Late Archaic coastal peoples and, therefore, its impact as a potential factor for social changes enacted during this time period, including increasing sedentism, formalization of intragroup relations, and regionalization of cultural identities, has yet to be explored.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carey James Garland ◽  
Victor D Thompson ◽  
Matthew C Sanger ◽  
Karen Y Smith ◽  
Fred T Andrus ◽  
...  

Circular shell rings along the Atlantic Coast of southeastern North America are the remnants of some of the earliest villages that emerged during the Late Archaic Period (5000 – 3000 BP). Many of these villages, however, were abandoned during the Terminal Late Archaic Period (ca 3800 – 3000 BP). Here, we combine Bayesian chronological modeling with multiple environmental proxies to understand the nature and timing of environmental change associated with the emergence and abandonment of shell ring villages on Sapleo Island, Georgia. Our Bayesian models indicate that Native Americans occupied the three Sapelo shell rings at varying times with some generational overlap. By the end of the complex’s occupation, only Ring III was occupied before abandonment ca. 3845 BP. Ring III also consists of statistically smaller oysters ( Crassostrea virginica ) that people harvested from less saline estuaries compared to earlier occupations. These data, when integrated with recent tree ring analyses, show a clear pattern of environmental instability throughout the period in which the rings were occupied. We argue that as the climate became unstable around 4300 BP, aggregation at shell ring villages provided a way to effectively manage fisheries that are highly sensitive to environmental change. However, with the eventual collapse of oyster fisheries and subsequent rebound in environmental conditions ca. 3800 BP, people dispersed from shell rings, and shifted to non-marine subsistence economies and other types of settlements. This study provides the most comprehensive evidence correlations between large-scale environmental change and societal transformations on the Georgia coast during the Late Archaic period.


Antiquity ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (289) ◽  
pp. 491-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Russo ◽  
G. Heide

Shell rings are circular and semi-circular deposits of shell (mostly oyster, Crassostrea virginica), faunal bone, artefacts and soil constructed along the Florida, Georgia and South Carolina coasts of the southeastern United States.Rings in Georgia and South Carolina date to c. 4200–3200 BP and range in size from 1 to 3 m tall and 22 to 83 m across. These little-studied sites have been suggested to be the remains of gaming arenas, astronomical observatories, torture chambers, houses of state, and fish traps. Most archaeologists view the sites as the subsistence remains of egalitarian hunter/fisher encampments. The rings’ generally symmetrical, circular shapes are seen as reflective of the equal status among their societal members wherein no individual or family held a unique or favoured position over another. The general absence of exotic or prestige artefacts, elaborate burials and ceremonial mounds has reinforced the concept that these Late Archaic shell rings reflect rudimentary hunter/fisher cultures. Ironically, shell rings have also been cited as the earliest evidence for the rise of hierarchical social development in North America (Russo 1991; Russo & Saunders 1999). Shell rings have yielded evidence of the earliest permanent year-round occupations, the earliest development of pottery and the earliest examples of large-scale monumental architecture. Consequentially the function of shell rings remains an open question.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Saunders

Freshwater and estuarine shellfish began to be exploited in the southeastern United States between 9000 and 7000 b.p. Shortly thereafter, shell mounds appeared in the mid-South Shell Mound Archaic, along the St. Johns River in peninsular Florida, and, somewhat later, in the Stallings Island area along the middle Savannah River. On the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, shell rings arose. Until recently, all these mounds were considered middens—the accumulations of the remains of simple meals of mobile peoples who visited the same areas for hundreds or thousands of years. More recent scholarship indicates that these mounds were deliberate constructions—some of the first sculpted landscapes created by Archaic peoples to memorialize the past, celebrate the present, and provide for the future. In this chapter, recent research on shell sites in these four areas is discussed. The emphasis is on changing perspectives about the peoples who built them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Joseph ◽  
Aaron Roth ◽  
Jonathan Ullman ◽  
Bo Waggoner

There are now several large scale deployments of differential privacy used to collect statistical information about users. However, these deployments periodically recollect the data and recompute the statistics using algorithms designed for a single use. As a result, these systems do not provide meaningful privacy guarantees over long time scales. Moreover, existing techniques to mitigate this effect do not apply in the “local model” of differential privacy that these systems use. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for local differential privacy that makes it possible to maintain up-to-date statistics over time, with privacy guarantees that degrade only in the number of changes in the underlying distribution rather than the number of collection periods. We use our technique for tracking a changing statistic in the setting where users are partitioned into an unknown collection of groups, and at every time period each user draws a single bit from a common (but changing) group-specific distribution. We also provide an application to frequency and heavy-hitter estimation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 2233-2275 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Levavasseur ◽  
M. Vrac ◽  
D. M. Roche ◽  
D. Paillard ◽  
A. Martin ◽  
...  

Abstract. We quantify the agreement between permafrost distributions from PMIP2 (Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project) climate models and permafrost data. We evaluate the ability of several climate models to represent permafrost and assess the inter-variability between them. Studying an heterogeneous variable such as permafrost implies to conduct analysis at a smaller spatial scale compared with climate models resolution. Our approach consists in applying statistical downscaling methods (SDMs) on large- or regional-scale atmospheric variables provided by climate models, leading to local permafrost modelling. Among the SDMs, we first choose a transfer function approach based on Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) to produce high-resolution climatology of surface air temperature (SAT). Then, we define permafrost distribution over Eurasia by SAT conditions. In a first validation step on present climate (CTRL period), GAM shows some limitations with non-systemic improvements in comparison with the large-scale fields. So, we develop an alternative method of statistical downscaling based on a stochastic generator approach through a Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR), which directly models the probabilities of local permafrost indices. The obtained permafrost distributions appear in a better agreement with data. In both cases, the provided local information reduces the inter-variability between climate models. Nevertheless, this also proves that a simple relationship between permafrost and the SAT only is not always sufficient to represent local permafrost. Finally, we apply each method on a very different climate, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) time period, in order to quantify the ability of climate models to represent LGM permafrost. Our SDMs do not significantly improve permafrost distribution and do not reduce the inter-variability between climate models, at this period. We show that LGM permafrost distribution from climate models strongly depends on large-scale SAT. The differences with LGM data, larger than in the CTRL period, reduce the contribution of downscaling and depend on several factors deserving further studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 164-175
Author(s):  
Sh. Sulaimanov ◽  
Zh. Esenalieva

The results of our study show that the respondent’s perception of large-scale social changes associated with the pandemic of the new coronavirus infection in the Kyrgyz Republic has a number of features. A sufficient level of awareness of the respondents about the symptoms of the disease, the ways of transmission of the virus, and measures to prevent the spread of infection are combined with an underestimation of the situation (17.2%). The majority (66.6%) of the respondents lived in Bishkek. The survey was held among 247 people, most of whom were women (57.3%) and young people (35.9±14.9 years). Every fourth participant in the study is a chronic tobacco smoker (24%). Less than half (47.3%) of the respondents were engaged in intellectual work. Among the respondents, the most common symptoms of COVID-19 were loss of taste or smell, fever, headache, muscle ache, cough, sore throat. Every third (28.4%) respondent was referred to an X-ray, CT scan. PCR and ELISA studies were carried out, respectively, by 22.5% and 10.9%.


Author(s):  
Robert W. Jobson ◽  
Frank Winchell ◽  
A.E. Picarella ◽  
Kiven C. Hill

In northeastern Oklahoma, very little is known about the transition from the Late Archaic to the Woodland period (Wyckoff and Brooks, 1983: 55). To date, most of the archeological evidence documenting this time period has been derived from sites with mixed or otherwise uncertain components. In this report, we present a preliminary description of a small rockshelter, 34RO252, which has a Late Archaic deposit stratigraphically below a Woodland era cultural deposit. These two deposits are unmixed, discrete, and are physically separated by an apparently sterile clay soil horizon. It is anticipated that the stratified cultural deposits at this site will help characterize the transition from the Late Archaic to the Early Woodland period along the Verdigris River in northeast Oklahoma. This site was first reported in April 1994 by two men who had discovered partially exposed human skeletal remains located in the rear remnant of a rockshelter at Oologah Lake in Rogers County, Oklahoma. The two men illegally excavated the remains and removed them from the site. 1 The rockshelter where the remains originated was subsequently examined by the authors and additional skeletal material was identified, in situ, in an exposed soil profile. A series of three radiocarbon assays, described below, placed the cultural deposit and the human remains within the Late Archaic-Woodland period (circa 780 B.C. to A.O. 900).2 This site is provisionally classified as corresponding to a cultural sequence that includes the old Grove C described by Purrington and Vehik.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (05) ◽  
pp. A11
Author(s):  
Kaiping Chen ◽  
Luye Bao ◽  
Anqi Shao ◽  
Pauline Ho ◽  
Shiyu Yang ◽  
...  

Understanding how individuals perceive the barriers and benefits of precautionary actions is key for effective communication about public health crises, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. This study used innovative computational methods to analyze 30,000 open-ended responses from a large-scale survey to track how Wisconsin (U.S.A.) residents' perceptions of the benefits of and barriers to performing social distancing evolved over a critical time period (March 19th to April 1st, 2020). Initially, the main barrier was practical related, however, individuals later perceived more multifaceted barriers to social distancing. Communication about COVID-19 should be dynamic and evolve to address people's experiences and needs overtime.


2018 ◽  
pp. 807-820
Author(s):  
Serhii Pyrozhkov

The author analyses the history of the establishment of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. He examines the legal procedures for the Academy’s establishment and emphasises that mutual understanding between the scientific community and authorities provides an opportunity to resolve a fundamental nation-wide problem within a short time span. It is also stressed that the crucial role in drafting the Law on the Establishment of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences belongs to M.P. Vasylenko and V.I. Vernadskyi, like-minded prominent scholars and men of science, towering figures who considered science as the blissful power. In addition, the article examines the main tasks pursued by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, namely providing a sound scientific underpinning for the development of Ukrainian society as well as increasing the role of sciences in civil life. The article substantiates that the comprehensive development of seminal works has always been and still remains the primary purpose of the Academy. All scholars who took part in its development disinterestedly worked upon the implementation of its concept and dedicated their lives to education. The author singles out five rather different periods in the operation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences: the establishment, expansion of activities during the World War II, post-war rejuvenation, development, and golden age owing to scientific and technological advancement. The fifth period is modern and has lasted since 1991. In the end, the author emphasises that the establishment of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was designed as a large-scale and socially significant project, whose implementation has eventually given rise to a powerful national intellectual centre with an ever increasing contribution to the development of the country, nation, and personalities. According to the fundamental principles and strategic goals of the Academy, its activity has been expanding for over a hundred years both in favourable and disadvantageous times, in conditions of social stability and continuous social changes. Keywords: Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, establishment, power, prominent scientists, important role.


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