Most researchers assume minimal impact of pretreatment on strontium isotope ratios ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) for bones and teeth, methods vary tremendously. We compared 14 methods, including no prep other than powdering enamel, ashing, soaking in water, an oxidizing agent (bleach or hydrogen peroxide) acetic acid (0.1 M, 1.0 M buffered with calcium acetate), a combination these steps. prepared analyzed a...

In an article entitled Mediasaurus, Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, compares contemporary mass media with the dinosaurs (Crichton 1993). The mass media, he writes, have become gigantic, clumsy creatures, ill suited and unable to adapt to the demands of the new environment of information technology with its flexible mini-media and computer networks. Consequently, they are obsolete, in...

Introduction Prevalence of Collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in modern animals, including humans. The natural selection of collagen as an anatomical scaffold was made long ago. Collagen has been isolated from soft tissue in the fossilized bones of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex and a half-million-year-old mastodon. No isolated DNA is that old. The archaeological longevity...

This paper uses a nested interaction networks approach to interpret patterns of social change in the late prehistoric U.S. southwest in comparative and world historical perspective. Place-centric interaction networks are arguably the best way to bound human systemic processes because approaches that attempt to define regions or areas based on attributes necessarily assume homogenous characteris...

Paleoecological sources indicate that the location and extent of Sierra Nevada rangelands have varied significantly during the last 20,000 years. Modern vegetative associations are recent, with montane wet meadows appearing during the last 3,000 years. A late Pleistocene sagebrush grassland existed where montane and subalpine forests occur today. In the central Sierra a pattern of deglaciation ...