When Cadogan wrote ‘Dating the Aegean Bronze Age without radiocarbon’ (1978), this writer agreed completely with the view that the absolute dating of the Aegean Late Bronze Age was already established. Correlations with Egypt and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean seemed secure, and virtually all Aegean prehistorians felt that radiocarbon dates could be ‘tested’ by comparison with the Aeg...

Efforts to estimate the effect of climate change on fisheries are hampered by the lack of models that ~ject realistic JMluatic habitat conditions at the regional scale. Data from the palcosciences are a suitable alternative both for environmental scenario development and model validation. We are using a paleoscience approach to calculate the potential effect of global warming on anadromous almo...

Dallas is a county located in the U.S state of Texas within the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area in north central Texas. As of July 1, 2006, the historic period in Texas including Dallas is defined by the date of contact between aboriginal groups and the Spanish explorers in the 1500s (1). Historical accounts describe that the Dallas area was inhabited by numerous Indian groups bef...

The limited morphometric work on early American crania to date has treated them as a single, temporally defined group. This paper addresses the question of whether there is significant variability among ancient American crania. A sample of 11 crania (Spirit Cave, Wizards Beach, Browns Valley, Pelican Rapids, Prospect, Wet Gravel male, Wet Gravel female, Medicine Crow, Turin, Lime Creek, and Swa...

A. " The First Internationalism " or the " First Dark Age " ? Half a century ago, Chicago Egyptologist Helene Kantor (1952) assembled some surprising observations on items traded into Egypt just as the first pharaohs were uniting the Nile Valley and the Delta into a single state at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Not only were some items, such as the cylinder seals being used by government...

Small islands are important model systems for examining the role of people in shaping novel environments and modifying resources through time. Here we report on vertebrate faunal assemblages recovered from two sites Ofu Olosega (American Samoa), which were occupied only a few centuries after initial settlement islands. We assess forager decision-making both locally regionally as well changing s...

Previous study showed that East Asian mtDNA haplogroups, especially those of Koreans, could be successfully assigned by the coupled use of analyses on coding region SNP markers and control region mutation motifs. In this study, we tried to see if the same triple multiplex analysis for coding regions SNPs could be also applicable to ancient samples from East Asia as the complementation for seque...

Xu et al. (1) argued that a west-east cline of Asian-Papuan genetic admixture across eastern Indonesia “is in excellent agreement with inferences” (ref. 1, p. 4574) regarding the expansion of Austronesian languages from Taiwan across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) from circa 4,000 y ago. They identify two major genetic populations within ISEA, “Asian” and “Papuan,” which allegedly reflect Austron...

Abrupt climatic changes in marginal areas, such as the central Sahara in the Early and Middle Holocene were among the major environmental constraints on prehistoric human groups. Social responses to these events were different, with different paths and outcomes. The spread of a ‘cattle cult’—animals buried in ‘megalithic’ stone structures—in the Sahara at the end of the 7th millennium BP (ca. 6...

Presented here are the most recent results of our studies of Rattus exulans, one of the main commensal animals transported across the Pacific by Lapita peoples and their descendants. We sampled several locations in Near Oceania to determine distribution of R. exulans mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes in the region. We also obtained data regarding distribution of other introduced Rattus speci...