Historical archaeologists should be leaders in examining the archaeological dimensions of race and racism in the United States. With few exceptions, though, this has not been the case, as most archaeologists have conflated race and ethnicity. American historical archaeologists have a great opportunity to provide new insights to the anthropological investigation of race and racism if they choose...

In this commentary I discuss the characteristic features and utility of house-centric approaches, focusing on the Lévi-Straussian société “à maisons.” In reviewing the contributions to this volume I point out future prospects and continuing problems of applying the house society as a model in archaeological applications, focusing on three major issues: (1) the implications of distinguishing the...

Medical anthropologists are involved in the control of several infectious and parasitic diseases throughout the world, but only recently have anthropologists (or any social scientists for that matter) conducted field studies on high mortality emerging diseases such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF). HEWLETT and AMOLA (5) provided the first systematic medical anthropological field study of Ebola ...

One of the main hallmarks of human agglomeration is task specialization and an expanded division of labour and this relationship has been a long-standing topic of inquiry among archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists. Recently, researchers investigating contemporary urban systems have proposed a novel explanation for this relationship grounded in a view of human settlement...

Cannibalism in the Paleolithic and prehistoric periods in Europe has been a controversial subject in discussions. Widely accepted or fully denied, it has attracted the attention of anthropologists and archaeologists for more than one hundred years. In this paper it will be shown that the human remains from the Krapina Neanderthal site have still a key position in current discussions on cannibal...

The idea that demographic change may spur or slow down technological change has become widely accepted among evolutionary archaeologists and anthropologists. Two models have been particularly influential in promoting this idea: a mathematical model by Joseph Henrich, developed to explain the Tasmanian loss of culture during the Holocene; and an agent-based adaptation thereof, devised by Powell ...

One of the hallmarks of human agglomeration is an increase in the division of labour, but the exact nature of this relationship has been debated among anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians and archaeologists. Over the last decade, researchers investigating contemporary urban systems have suggested a novel explanation for the links between the numbers of inhabitants in settle...

BACKGROUND Archaeologists and anthropologists have long recognized that different cultural complexes may have distinct descent histories, but they have lacked analytical techniques capable of easily identifying such incongruence. Here, we show how bayesian phylogenetic analysis can be used to identify incongruent cultural histories. We employ the approach to investigate Iranian tribal textile t...