Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
PNAS: Opinion, 2020
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In heritage management, archaeologists are often asked to answer three basic questions: How many ... more In heritage management, archaeologists are often asked to answer three basic questions: How many sites are in a project area? Where are these sites located? And, which sites have to be mitigated? To answer these questions with any precision, archaeologists rely on existing information on culture and the environment to design surveys, which document the types and numbers of sites. They also conduct limited test excavations at a sample of sites to determine their potential scientific importance. As these new data are obtained from the field, they are used to assess survey adequacy and to infer cultural behaviors from settlement and resource locations. Predictive modeling and geographic information system (GIS) technology provide a single platform from which these three endeavors can be performed in an efficient, objective, and replicable manner.
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The Playa Vista Archaeological and Historical Project provides an important opportunity for condu... more The Playa Vista Archaeological and Historical Project provides an important opportunity for conducting geoarchaeological research in the Ballona Wetlands. A detailed landscape reconstruction was made based on multidisciplinary paleoecological studies of core samples. This reconstruction is being used to explain how and why human land-use and settlement patters have shifted over the last 7,000 years.
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
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Entrevista /// Arqueologia para la proteccion del patrimonio cultural y social. Entrevista con el... more Entrevista /// Arqueologia para la proteccion del patrimonio cultural y social. Entrevista con el Dr. Jeff Altschul //// Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Licenciatura en Desarrollo y Gestion Interculturales. //// Audio. Duracion: 52 minutos. //// Descarga: Pulse boton derecho del raton sobre el archivo de audio "mp3" que elija y seleccione "Guardar Destino Como...
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Keith W. Kintigh, Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy... more Keith W. Kintigh, Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Fredrick Limp, Herbert D.G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, and Melinda A. Zeder. (2014). Forum: Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79(1):5-24.
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Ex Novo: Journal of Archaeology
Landholding agencies in the United States are under increasing pressure to integrate cultural and... more Landholding agencies in the United States are under increasing pressure to integrate cultural and natural resource management approaches at a landscape level and to do so earlier and more comprehensively in planning processes. How to integrate management practices is poorly understood, however. An impediment to integration is that the laws, methods, and tools used in cultural and natural resource management differ significantly. Natural resource management protects or rehabilitates habitats and ecosystems that support endangered species, while cultural resource management focuses on identification and protection of individual sites. Agencies need to shift the focus from managing sites to defining cultural landscape elements and their relationship to natural resource management units and concerns. We suggest that agencies use archaeological predictive modeling, resource classes, and paleoenvironmental and cultural historical information to geospatially define cultural landscapes, pre...
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Advances in Archaeological Practice: <br> A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology, 2013
Archaeologists have traditionally collected artifacts during survey in order to analyze them in a... more Archaeologists have traditionally collected artifacts during survey in order to analyze them in a laboratory setting and curate the artifacts and associated documentation for future analysis, interpretation, and preservation. In recent decades, however, there has been a trend in the western United States to avoid collection during survey and to relegate most artifact analysis to the field, typically conducted by field crew. Despite heavy reliance on in-field analysis to characterize sites during survey, very little is known about how accurate and adequate in-field analysis is for site interpretation and management. This article presents the findings of a pilot experiment that tested in-field analysis and digital photograph analysis at two sites in the western United States using multiple quantitative measures and qualitative assessments. The results of the analysis show that in-field analysis has a strong potential to yield inaccurate and highly variable results that can lead to the...
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American Antiquity, 1999
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American Antiquity, 2005
sequences particularly challenging. Thus, the only tabulation of radiocarbon dates from all of th... more sequences particularly challenging. Thus, the only tabulation of radiocarbon dates from all of the different sites comes in a single table entitled "Regional Chronology" (pp. 234-235), almost at the end of the book. Where tables do exist in these chapters, they frequently duplicate data already presented in the text: for example, the same information on stratigraphic sequences is presented twice for each site, once in the text and once in tabular format. The latter would be entirely sufficient. While some of these data are summarized in the final chapters of the book, these summaries are usually by cultural phases across the area as a whole and not by archaeological horizons in each site. Organization of more of these data into a series of standardized tables for each excavation would have been very helpful.
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American Antiquity, 2014
This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most i... more This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments s...
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Advances in Archaeological Practice, 2015
Archaeological data and research results are essential to addressing such fundamental questions a... more Archaeological data and research results are essential to addressing such fundamental questions as the origins of human culture; the origin, waxing, and waning of civilizations and cities; the response of societies to long-term climate changes; and the systemic relationships implicated in human-induced changes in the environment. However, we lack the capacity for acquiring, managing, analyzing, and synthesizing the data sets needed to address important questions such as these. We propose investments in computational infrastructure that would transform archaeology’s ability to advance research on the field’s most compelling questions with an evidential base and inferential rigor that have heretofore been impossible. At the same time, new infrastructure would make archaeological data accessible to researchers in other disciplines. We offer recommendations regarding data management and availability, cyberinfrastructure tool building, and social and cultural changes in the discipline. W...
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Public Archaeology, 2014
The range of organizations involved in some way with cultural heritage management stand in proxy ... more The range of organizations involved in some way with cultural heritage management stand in proxy for an equally wide range of concerns and viewpoints. While these viewpoints differ considerably in detail, we suggest that a fundamental objective of all these organizations is to ensure that an appropriate kind and degree of cultural heritage work occurs within development contexts. The last twenty years has witnessed such progress in the underlying principles of economic development (in &#39;developed&#39; or &#39;develop-ing&#39; world countries) that the notion of heritage and economic development as equally necessary in order for a sustainable future is shared by all the major participants. We explicitly include the &#39;developers&#39; as a participant in cultural heritage management. Our experience is that private companies sponsoring development are rarely opposed to undertaking heritage work, although they desperately want clear guidance on what this work is supposed to entail. Both heritage and development organizations have a valuable role to play in promoting sustainable economic development, but our experiences in the very differing desert fringes of Senegal and Mongolia suggests that neither alone, nor the two in concert, are truly effective, and that the role of individuals and organizations acting with professional and ethical responsibility is pivotal in this endeavour. keywords heritage management, sustainable economic development, professionalism, professional associations, consultants and national heritage agencies
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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2014
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Ex Novo Journal of Archaeology, 2019
Landholding agencies in the United States are under increasing pressure to integrate cultural and... more Landholding agencies in the United States are under increasing pressure to integrate cultural and natural resource management approaches at a landscape level and to do so earlier and more comprehensively in planning processes. How to integrate management practices is poorly understood, however. An impediment to integration is that the laws, methods, and tools used in cultural and natural resource management differ significantly. Natural resource management protects or rehabilitates habitats and ecosystems that support endangered species, while cultural resource management focuses on identification and protection of individual sites. Agencies need to shift the focus from managing sites to defining cultural landscape elements and their relationship to natural resource management units and concerns. We suggest that agencies use archaeological predictive modeling, resource classes, and paleoenvironmental and cultural historical information to geospatially define cultural landscapes, pre...
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