Search

Copyright of Kiva is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Kiva is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This project connects past forms of structural violence to current health conditions found in communities. Using historical and archaeological material from deindustrializing region in the United States, it appears that nutritional and livelihood stress in the late nineteenth century may have resulted in the transgenerational inheritance of negative human health outcomes experienced by descendants today. While more in-depth genetic research is needed, it is clear that the study of health disparities found today may be situated in the long-term stresses (environmental and nutritional) that communities faced generations ago. Historical archaeology is a way to develop a longitudinal study of health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What were the origins of the 'Chicago method' of scientific excavation? What is it and how did it get that name? Does its origin predate its popular employment at excavations in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s, and go back to institutional competition between Frederic Ward Putnam of the Field Museum and Frederick Starr of the University of Chicago? Or was it the result of the fieldwork of avocational archaeologist and one of Putnam's first students, William Baker Nickerson, who implemented it as the basis of his fieldwork, and proved its efficacy, for many years before he retired in 1921? Nickerson's detailed notes on the results of his thorough stratigraphic excavation techniques, used at many archaeological sites in Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Minnesota, were passed on to the first University of Chicago field party doing archaeological work in Illinois, that consequently became the foundations of the later 'Chicago method'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed and evaluated empirical models to predict biological condition of wadeable streams in a large portion of the eastern USA, with the ultimate goal of prediction for unsampled basins. Previous work had classified (i.e., altered vs. unaltered) the biological condition of 920 streams based on a biological assessment of macroinvertebrate assemblages. Predictor variables were limited to widely available geospatial data, which included land cover, topography, climate, soils, societal infrastructure, and potential hydrologic modification. We compared the accuracy of predictions of biological condition class based on models with continuous and binary responses. We also evaluated the relative importance of specific groups and individual predictor variables, as well as the relationships between the most important predictors and biological condition. Prediction accuracy and the relative importance of predictor variables were different for two subregions for which models were created. Predictive accuracy in the highlands region improved by including predictors that represented both natural and human activities. Riparian land cover and road-stream intersections were the most important predictors. In contrast, predictive accuracy in the lowlands region was best for models limited to predictors representing natural factors, including basin topography and soil properties. Partial dependence plots revealed complex and nonlinear relationships between specific predictors and the probability of biological alteration. We demonstrate a potential application of the model by predicting biological condition in 552 unsampled basins across an ecoregion in southeastern Wisconsin (USA). Estimates of the likelihood of biological condition of unsampled streams could be a valuable tool for screening large numbers of basins to focus targeted monitoring of potentially unaltered or altered stream segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]