Browsing by Department "Anthropology"
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Item 1-800 worlds : embodiment and experience in the Indian call center economy(2010-08) Krishnamurthy, Mathangi Kasi; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Brow, James; Stewart, Kathleen; Abraham, Itty; Flores, RichardThis dissertation is concerned with the everyday lives of transnational Indian call center workers when situated within the global politics of voice-based outsourcing. The call center economy gained impetus in early 2000-2001, when multinational corporations began to train young men and women in India to mask their spatial and temporal location, in order that they could serve customers in the US and the UK. Taking calls through the night to serve the work day of Western consumers, these customer service agents were asked to assume a different name, location, and cultural and language markers, as part of the requirements of work. I explore the ways in which these young, middle-class workers located themselves within practices, contentious representations, and material outcomes of this transnational outsourcing economy. Through ethnographic research in Pune, a prominent university town and call center hub in western India, I investigate (1) everyday life in and out of the call center, (2) labor management practices within call centers, and (3) the socio-economic and cultural transformations that accompanied and framed the development of the urban Indian call center economy. This research engages with the machinations of multinational corporations as they incorporate large number of labor forces worldwide into transnational work. It builds on three main bodies of theory - flexible or late capital and flexibility, the South Asian postcolonial nation-state, and affective labor. Through these, I provide a thick description of the history, construction, maintenance and disruption of this site, as also the ways in which this particular story of capital was stabilized. I engage with questions such as, what complex negotiations underlie the ostensible success of new service economies in India? What are its cultural, political and economic determinants and ramifications? What grounds are the claims of state, capital and culture being contested or reified upon, and what do such negotiations mean for service workers within the landscape of urban India? This dissertation shows how the practice of everyday life in this transnational milieu is best explained as the collusion and tension between the contested socio-economic spaces of the new Indian middle-classes and middle-class-ness, and an ungrounded discourse of mobile and flexible capital. The stories of call center workers in this analysis are the stories of particular subjects called upon and striving to be constantly flexible in order to successfully become middle-class and global in the same breath, one often seamlessly overlapping the other.Item A knowable space and time : intervening in the hierarchies of history via chronotopic language(2019-02-08) McCord, Carlisia Tierra; Menchaca, Martha; Slotta, JamesArchaeology of the Black and African Diaspora contributes greatly to the heritigization of Black life in the Americas. Following this line of thought, I analyze the discursive constructions of historical Black social life in America using the written documents and exhibitions from a small post-emancipation archaeological project in Travis County, Texas. The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead Archaeological Project was excavated by a cultural resource management firm in the effort to preserve an important piece of African American history from the late 19th century. Sites such as the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead are recent crystallizations of memory and history based in both pride and trauma in the American narrative. Sites and monuments such as these do the important work of highlighting an often-marginalized version of past American events—and as folklore and history are crucial parts of identity creation, its equally important to discuss how these representations of the past give expression to contemporary social experience. My report is an analysis of how the resulting data, exhibitions, television spots, and oral history report from the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead Archaeological Project fit into the discursive frameworks that shape space and belonging over time in the American narrative. I examine how contributions to the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead Archaeological Project is in conversation with various interpretations of the preservation of American history; and how the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead Archaeological Project is, at times, interpreted with the intent to contrast the dominant spatial and historical memory of American life after the Civil War, a memory which extends and shapes life beyond the era and area of the site. My analysis contributes to the bodies of work that addresses the hierarchical spatial and temporal organization of Western progress which continues to perpetuate a violent erasure and misshaping of marginalized communities.Item A Mongolian horsepacking adventure through my paranoid poetics of digital ontology(2019-05) Hazera, Eduardo Iskender; Hartigan, John, Jr., 1964-; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This is not quite an essay. It is more of a scientific experiment conducted with words. It titrates the paranoid poetics of critique with the narrative practices of social media to precipitate a postcritical theory of digital ontology. The organic compounds used in this titration were extracted from a 16-month mine of ethnography among digitalreal tourists known as Dimecams. This ethnographic mine was full of participant-observations among the “digital” and “real” aggregates of horsepacking adventures in Mongolia. Starting with myths of Mongolian adventures that circulate in the backpacker communities of Asia, this experiment rewires the narrative circuits of exploration to illuminate two distinct iterations of adventure—the “real” and the “digital.” Common sense would have it that digital adventures appearing on social media are “representations” of real adventures from the flesh. The experiments I conducted, however, demonstrated that the digital and the real are actually two separate ontologies in which different types of adventures occur. Real adventures are full of misery and hunger while digital adventures are nothing but epic selfies and unhinged freedom. The radical alterity between these two kinds of adventures necessitated a turn towards ontology. However, in this ontological turn, my experiment spun out of control and crystallized as a fractal. That fractal was later revealed to be a continuously self-referential postcritique of the paranoid poetics of critique. The same fractal was also shown to be the operational procedure which kept the narrative ontology of digital adventures afloat in a self-sustaining world that endlessly retold itself into existence. What emerged at the end of this experiment was a not-quite-ontology composed of not-quite-beings—which, in the not-too-distant future, will detach itself from reality entirely, drifting off into space and forming a new planetItem A political ecology approach to investigate the environmental impacts of cattle management in Puerto Rico, 16th to 19th centuries(2018-05-04) Sánchez-Morales, Lara M.; Rosen, Arlene MillerThe nature and scale of environmental impacts due to the introduction of livestock into New World contexts has been the subject of much debate within disciplines concerned with changes of land use and land cover. The introduction of Old World species of herbivores into New World landscapes is often regarded as a catalyst to rapid environmental changes and a prevailing notion associates the presence of cattle with environmental degradation. My research aims to explore the environmental effects of cattle in Puerto Rico following European colonization. In this report, I employ a Political Ecology framework to contextualize the development of cattle management practices in Puerto Rico from the 16th to the 19th centuries. I discuss the potential of using a Political Ecology approach to understand the relationship between Spanish colonialism, cattle management practices, and environmental transformations. Finally, I propose the implementation of a geoarchaeological methodology to answer remaining questions on the impacts of cattle management during the colonial period in Puerto Rico.Item A-AVOIR Resistance : a cross cultural study of sexual citizenship in North America and France(2012-05) Batiste, Dominique Pierre; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Johnson, MichaelWhat forms of resistance are gay men in France and North America enacting against heteronormativity and homophobia? And why are they enacting these particular forms of resistance? To answer these questions, this thesis aims to draw connections between gay men's resistance strategies and larger socio-political phenomena in both France and North American cultures. First I focus on the discursive construction of citizens, both heterosexual and homosexual, in order to illustrate how gay men are relegated to second-class citizenship based on their sexual identities and practices. My focus, here, is cultural citizenship and sexual citizenship, two themes that run throughout this thesis. Next, I use Foucault's theories of knowledge-power to reveal how power relations in society discursively create subject positions, such as 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals', utilizing structures of control, norms, rewards, and punishments in order to champion heterosexuality to the detriment of homosexuality. In order to contest exercises of power, gay men engage in acts of resistance. i examine scholarly debates centered on resistance, and create a list of criterion for overt resistance, which I dub A AVOIR Resistance on account that it includes the characteristics of Action, Alternatives, Visibility, Opposition, Intent, and Recognition. Utilizing my rubric for overt resistance, as well as Foucault's notions of power, I analyze interview transcripts from a sample of gay men in North America and France to reveal that some gay men, living outside of large metropolitan areas, are rejecting hegemonic ideals of 'gayness' and integrating into mainstream heteronormative society. These men are creating what I call 'authentic communities' where many individuals from various backgrounds and lifestyles live together harmoniously based primarily on access to resources rather than identity markers such as sexual identity. this research shows a split between the ways that urban and suburban gay men embody their homosexuality. Since research on gay men focuses on those living in urban areas, my research calls, instead, for focus on suburban gay men and their resistance to homo-normative ideologies of what it means to me gay.Item Accessibility of Nirvāṇa : the language and media of Sri Lankan Buddhist televangelists and their followers(2023-04-20) Fedricks, Krishantha Gemunu Kumara; Handman, Courtney, 1975-; Webster, Anthony K., 1969-; Spencer, Jonathan; Slotta, James; Keating, ElizabethDuring the last two decades of upheaval in Sri Lanka (including civil war, ethnic violence and the current economic crisis), a new transnational movement of televangelist Buddhist monks, collectively part of the Mahamevnāva Monastery, has emerged encouraging followers to access nirvāṇa (liberation from suffering) in this lifetime. The movement encourages lay Buddhists to prioritize attaining nirvāṇa over material wealth and nationalist politics. To make the concept more accessible to a wider audience, the Mahamevnāva movement has built over fifty branch monasteries, known as asapu (hermitages) in urban settings in Sri Lanka and twenty worldwide since 1999. In their rituals, they use colloquial Sinhala instead of the traditional Pāli language and employ modern televisual technologies to create new ritual spectacles of nirvāṇa. This dissertation examines how Mahamevnāva Buddhists—both monks lay practitioners—are reforming Buddhist practice through innovative rituals and new linguistic and media forms to create a non-hierarchical, non-consumerist, non-nationalist religious movement focused on attaining nirvāṇa in this world. I furthermore explore how in doing so the movement has produced a new hierarchical form of nationalist religiosity for an urban middle-class of Sri Lankan Buddhists. This dissertation seeks to move beyond polarizing paradigms of either materialist consumerism or nationalist politics on the one hand and decontextualized religious liberation on the other, viewing it instead as a Post-Protestant Buddhist movement, a reformation of 19th century Protestant Buddhist practice through new techniques of mediation. Thus, this dissertation argues that non-materialistic religious identities can coexist with consumerist forms of media and nationalist language. In turn, the uptake of this accessible nirvāṇa, through new forms of media and linguistic registers of emerging ritual practices, contributes to a religious transformation and a new form of nationalism. Ultimately this research reveals that this religious reformation caters to the demand of modern individuals to access liberation amidst the embodied "evil" of neoliberalism, social hierarchy, and political uncertainty. As such, both new and traditional media formats make the previously inaccessible goal of liberation an attainable objective in this lifetime for trans-local and transnational Sri Lankan lay middle-class subjects.Item Admixture Correction in the Outgroup-f3 Statistic(2018-05) Tunga, Nita; Austin, Jennifer MannGenetic inheritance can be studied within a purely genetic scope. However, this eliminates part of the picture. The field of genetics is often thought of as a natural science with little in common with fields of social science. However, in human genetics and the genetics of the organisms which humans impact, the role of cultural and societal forces cannot be ignored. For instance, lactase is an enzyme used to digest lactose in milk. As such, it is an enzyme whose activity reduces significantly after weaning. Nonetheless, as humans have begun to ingest more dairy products into adulthood, lactase persistence has evolved to enable humans to digest these dairy products. My research involves mathematically representing the genetic similarity of two populations accurately via the f3 statistic. The outgroup-f3 statistic is useful in understanding a population’s genetic history and how genetically related two populations are. It shows how close two populations are compared to a third population that is equally distant genetically from the first two. However, if two populations share a recent genetic interaction with another population, the outgroup-f3 statistic could show those two populations as being closer together than they truly are. This genetic interaction of two or more previously isolated populations interbreeding is referred to as admixture. Admixture skews, or even inhibits, an understanding of those populations’ genetic histories. To avoid this problem, I have attempted to devise a modified version of the outgroup-f3 statistic to ensure an accurate representation of genetic relatedness. For my project, artificial admixture was introduced in six unadmixed human populations. Depending on the relationship between increased contamination and the f3 statistic, we proposed and adjusted solutions for a corrected f3 accordingly. I tested my proposed corrections by applying it to populations that contain individuals with and without recent histories of genetic admixture. After correcting for the proportion of admixture in the population, I compared this corrected outgroup-f3 statistic to the outgroup-f3 value calculated for the original unadmixed population. The goal of this work is to have a corrected statistic that one can apply to two populations, independent of admixture proportions. Ultimately, this will help us to better understand the evolutionary histories of populations. Moreover, a corrected statistic will aid other researchers as they analyse demographic histories further in the past.Item Advancing the archaeology of architecture : a GIS-based approach to the organization of built space in the castros of Northwest Iberia(2019-08-30) Hurt, John Duncan; Wade, Maria de Fátima, 1948-This thesis is framed as a contribution to the study of spatial organization at the scale of the individual settlement, specifically in the context of the castros of Northwest Iberia. I argue that new approaches to the description and analysis of organizational properties are needed to improve the current state of research on this topic. I propose a new methodology toward this end by applying concepts and methods from spatial statistics in a GIS environment. I demonstrate the potential of my proposition through a preliminary case study involving two castro sites from northwestern Portugal: Cividade de Terroso and Castro de Romariz. I conclude by discussing the implications of my work for the study of architecture and spatial organization in castro settlements, suggesting that there is much to be gained by further pursuit and expansion of this new methodological approachItem Affecting change : death, violence and protest in Manipur, Northeastern India(2015-05) Kshetrimayum, Jogendro Singh; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation explores some of the ways in which precarity takes form in a reeling present. Many social and political analysts have described the contemporary socio-economic and political situation in the Northeastern states of India, marked by a situation of civil war for more than half-a-century, as an “impasse.” With particular focus on Manipur, one of the eight Northeastern states, this dissertation looks at some of the ways in which people live through this “impasse.” Through a series of extraordinary and ordinary scenes, brief encounters, public testimonies, biographical sketches and autobiographical accounts it speaks of the precariousness of life, relationships, rituals and cultural categories even as people suffer and respond to the ongoing “crisis” of law and order, a defining feature of the “impasse.” Inspired by the affective turn in Critical Theory, this dissertation does not see precarity as necessarily traumatizing, thereby keeping the trope of trauma at a critical distance while attending to the lives of people in a situation of low-intensity armed conflict of long duration. It does not claim to provide any final explanation of what is happening in Manipur today rather it offers an innovative way to revisit anew some of the old anthropological questions about people and places undergoing dramatic changes.Item Afro-Cuban movement(s) : performing autonomy in "updating" Havana(2016-05) Berry, Maya Janeen; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Hale, Charles R; Smith, Christen A; Moore, Robin D; Paredez, Deborah; Skurski, JulieThis dissertation is an ethnography of how Afro-Cubans are enacting coordinated movement toward more desirable futures as they face increased marginalization due to Cuba’s current political economic reforms. Yoruba Andabo —a group of dancers, percussionists, and singers— take center stage in this project, as a case study to examine the unexpected ways that Afro-Cubans are practicing collective agency, going against the logics of more conventional registers of black identity politics. I use La Articulación Regional Afrodescendiente de América Latína y el Caribe- Capítulo Cuba (ARAC), as an analytical counterpoint to represent a more conventional pursuit of sociopolitical gains by black identity politics in Cuba today. Of central interest is how the sacred figures within cultural politics, to gain greater sociopolitical and economic autonomy, and how gender operates within their political imaginaries, using a critical race, feminist and performance-oriented lens. The ethnography makes the case for different ways of performing black autonomy in Cuba correlating to particular metrics of politics drawn from collective memories of group struggle. These different forms of self-organization correspond to distinct spheres of influence and distinct limits on their collective reach and agency. Furthermore, the research demonstrates the utility of performance studies for furthering the understanding of social processes by making visible the political horizon of black identity politics in embodied motion. This analysis of black collective agency in the face of political economic marginalization speaks directly to the importance of local practices of self-determination as sources of knowledge production about the limits of cultural politics endorsed by the state, the sacred and gendered valences of black identity politics, and the impact of national development on black lives.Item After Umm Kulthūm : pop music, postcolonial modernity, and gendered national subjectivity in Cairo(2010-05) Gilman, Daniel Jason; Keeler, Ward; Ali, Kamran A.; Strong, Pauline T.; Walters, Keith; Shemer, YaronI argue that the ways in which members of the youth generation in Cairo, Egypt consume Arabic-language popular music, and the aesthetic criteria by which they evaluate the worth of various songs and singers, constitute a key component, along with corresponding criteria of political, racial, gendered, and cultural authenticity of Egyptian subjectivity, of a new form of Egyptian gendered national subjectivity in postcolonial modernity. These aesthetic and authenticating criteria are fundamentally interrelated, as one’s consumer preferences within genres of Egyptian popular music are often taken as indicative of the nature of one’s Egyptian subjectivity. For previous generations in postcolonial Egypt, discriminating taste for high modernist aesthetics in popular music, especially the singer Umm Kulthūm, comprised an aspect of desirable cultural modernity and authenticity. This aesthetic has been superseded among contemporary youth by an emphasis on direct emotional evocation as an index of authenticity. Correspondingly, youth in Cairo have come to judge the authenticity of their Egyptian subjectivity against the political subjectivity of their elders’ generations, and the authenticity of their gendered, racial, and cultural subjectivities against those of the West and those of other Arab countries, most particularly Lebanon.Item The afterschool battle : reproducing a racial binary in an urban school(2014-05) Childs, Alysia Ann; Foster, Kevin Michael, 1969-; Hartigan, John, 1964-This dissertation project is a critical anthropological analysis of the impact of colorism on the educational attainment and academic trajectory of African-American school students in Washington, DC by examining teacher expectations. Through a historical and contemporary lens of public education in DC, I examine the ways in which a black-white racial binary has been used by those in decision-making positions -- namely teachers, counselors, school administrators, Parents and Teachers Association members and other adult decision-makers -- as an indicator of a student's academic ability and their future educational attainment. What prompts this question is the abundance of academic programs in DC that, through a variety of extensive selection criteria, chose high-achieving students for placement in the city's college-preparatory, academic programs, who have a larger tendency to fit a particular phenotype (unless they are exceptionalized through other socioeconomic indicators). Two questions that my research addresses are: how phenotype is weighed against their actual versus perceived academic ability; and how do we explain the relative over-investment (i.e., redundancy of enrichment programs and resources) at one school over a lack of resources and programs at many other schools. I selected Washington, DC as the site for my doctoral research for two primary reasons: (1) its historic association for being one of the most (skin) color-conscious cities in the United States (Russell et al. 1992; Golden 2006; Kerr 2006); and (2) its historic and unique position as a testing ground for reform efforts in the public school system. I volunteered at a DC-area public school for the 2011-2012 academic year and became active in the various parental/community associations (i.e. the Parent/Teacher Association (PTA) and the Local School Advisory Team (LSAT) as a means of gaining first-hand knowledge of -- and experience with -- the various ways in which adults (i.e. teachers, counselors, parents and other school-based staff) place value and justify the assignment of resources to particular students and upon what basis (such as phenotype or socioeconomic background). In gaining access to and awareness of the dynamics of parental engagement at my field site, I began to analyze the role of race in the ways that such involvement is contained or policed by school officials. This dissertation project also takes into account students' awareness of such intersectional processes and whether the students categorize themselves and/or their peers according to a hierarchical scale of valorization.Item Akoben : performance, politics and foundational narratives of Blackness(2015-12) Soares, Maria Andrea dos Santos; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Gordon, Edmund; James, Joy; Jones, Omi Joni; Hale, CharlesThis work investigates Black performances and the performance of Blackness as expression of narratives centered in the fact of existing in this world while a Black being. The themes investigated in this study are ontology, performance, and politics of Blackness deployed by Black Brazilian artists in Rio de Janeiro. In March 2012, several Black artists mobilized to protest against the systematic exclusion of artists and cultural producers of African descent from Brazilian state-sponsored funding opportunities. The Akoben movement—a word that represents the Adinkra symbol meaning “War Horn”—has the goals of Akoben of: to demand transparency from the state in funding decisions, to assure that selection committees will represent Brazilian diversity, and to implement Affirmative Action policies in state-sponsored funding opportunities. Departing from the review of how cultural expressions and art forms associated with African descendants have been used, I will discuss how Akoben brings questions of cultural appropriation and of material and symbolic alienation as effects of racism to the forefront of public debate. I will also discuss the subject of state co-optation of Black activists and the withdrawal of leaders from the social movement to engage within the state or with political parties. In the process of engaging with the state, the Akoben mobilization creates grounds for a racial identity that these artists’ aesthetic creations and activist trajectories feed. Such aesthetic and political processes resist material and symbolic forms of racial subjugation while simultaneously creating a space for exchange and learning, for the establishment of professional networks, and for political action. However, the internal contradictions and limitations, the disputes generated from alignments of Black social movements and of individuals with state institution and political parties, constrain the possibilities of more radical projects of Black liberation either in political, in aesthetic or in ontological terms.Item The American West through Representations of the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup(2019-05) Wilson, Sylvia; Seriff, SuzanneThe Sweetwater Jaycees’ World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup includes a pageant; a carnival; community dances; guided hunts; bus tours of rattlesnake dens; a gun, coin and knife show; cook-offs; and a flea market, all in addition to the main event—the rattlesnake pits. As the rattlesnakes cycle through the coliseum, they are weighed, milked of their venom, draped over participants’ shoulders for photographs, and finally slaughtered. The Roundup is known globally for its provocative handling of rattlesnakes and resulting imagery which has positioned the event as a captivating subject for photography, film, and television. This project seeks to analyze the ways in which three media representations of the Roundup uphold, construct, and challenge myths of the American West. First, I examine Richard Avedon’s In the American West photography series which tells a story of American isolation, hopelessness, and frightening beauty as depicted in the faces of individuals he encountered at the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. Next, I investigate the Simpsons’ “Whacking Day” episode, which was inspired by the Roundup in Sweetwater and uses parody to comment on issues of virility, groupthink, education, religion, and environmental justice in the West, and more broadly, rural, working-class America. Finally, I analyze the Miss Snake Charmer documentary, directed by Rachael Waxler and EmaLee Arroyo, as it depicts coming of age as a woman in the American West. In primarily focusing the film on the preparatory process for the pageant, rather than competition night itself, the documentary emphasizes the ways in which girls are molded into the “ideal” Western woman. Through this work, I investigate how a single event comes to serve as a tool for artists wishing to uphold, build upon, or challenge myths of the American West. Furthermore, as myths of the American West have come to define parts of American national identity, representations of the Rattlesnake Roundup not only sustain or dispute heritage narratives of the West, but of the United States more broadly.Item An analysis of primate gait on multiple and inconsistent substrates in natural environments, using Saimiri sciureus as a model(2018-08-06) McNamara, Allison Joan; Shapiro, Liza J.Primate quadrupedal gait has primarily been studied in the laboratory setting on artificial poles of different diameters (simulating arboreal locomotion) and on flat surfaces (simulating terrestrial locomotion). However, wild primates encounter complex matrices of substrates of different sizes, orientations, heights, and compliances, and often move on multiple substrates within each locomotor bout. Thus, the current understanding of primate gait is limited by the artificial setting of the laboratory. This study investigates the quadrupedal gait of wild Saimiri sciureus (common squirrel monkey) across multiple substrates at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador. High-speed video footage (120fps, 1080p) was collected between August and October 2017. Multiple substrate use was categorized into seven different challenge types including gap, linear transition, obstacle, offshoot, parallel, ladder, and no challenge. The Anteroposterior Sequence method (Abourachid, 2003) was used to calculate time lags between touchdowns of paired fore and hindlimbs and between ipsilateral fore and hindlimbs (Abourachid, 2003). Saimiri used significantly more asymmetrical walking gaits than symmetrical gaits (p=0.02), and, when using symmetrical gaits, used significantly more diagonal sequence than lateral sequence gaits (p<0.01). Alterations of kinematic variables between strides without challenges to strides with challenges were calculated to determine how Saimiri kinematically adjusts to challenges during quadrupedal bouts. Saimiri significantly adjusted pair lag (p=0.03) and fore lag (p=0.02) in strides with a challenge. Saimiri was significantly more likely to change its footfall sequence during strides with a challenge than strides without a challenge (p=0.05). However, type of challenge did not significantly affect kinematic adjustments. These results indicate that primate quadrupedalism is flexible and can be adjusted for animals to maintain stability across complex substrates. This study highlights the importance of combining field and laboratory methods to capture the range of substrate variation that primates face in their natural habitats.Item Analysis of ceramic pipes, ear ornaments and effigies from the George C. Davis site(1975) Fritz, Gayle; Story, Dee Ann, 1931-2010Item Analysis of factors influencing Castro Culture settlement locations : a fairly puzzling arrangement(2021-12-01) Bowers, Jordan D.; Wade, Maria de Fátima, 1948-; Franklin, Maria; Monteiro Rodrigues, Sérgio; Reed, Denné; Wilson, SamuelThe Castro Culture of Northwest Iberia is an Iron Age archaeological culture, of which hillforts, known locally as castros, are the only known type of settlement. In this dissertation, I use a variety of geospatial analytic methods to examine several topographic and environmental characteristics to identify those that the people of the Castro Culture found preferential at the local scale for the establishment of new settlements, and to understand how these factors may have played a role in the unequal distribution of settlements across Northwest Iberia. Through this research, I suggest that the following characteristics were preferential for the establishment of settlements: 1) regions with landforms classified as “high hills” and “scattered low mountains,” 2) locations near a stream, but no closer than 100 meters, 3) intervisibility with one or more settlements, and 4) positions that are topographically prominent, possibly to limit access to the settlement. I further suggest that the greater density of settlements within thirty kilometers of the coast may be linked to climatic factors that allowed for greater agricultural productivity and increased access to maritime trade, though an in-depth study of the role socio-political ties played in settlement proliferation and clustering should be performed in the future.Item An analysis of the G. E. Arnold survey of east Texas(1975) Im, Hyo-jae; Story, Dee Ann, 1931-2010Item Analysis of the native ceramics from the Deshazo Site, Nacogdoches County, Texas(1981) Fields, Ross C.; Story, Dee Ann, 1931-2010Item An analysis of the preclassic households beneath the main plaza at Colha, Belize(1987) Anthony, Dana, 1952-