Walking the desert, paddling the sea: Comcaac mobility in time

Martínez-Tagüeña, Natalia; Cubillas, Luz Alicia Torres

doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2017.12.004

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Haas and Kuhn approach this problem from an ecological perspective, arguing that foragers would only reoccupy a location if it was in their economic best interest to do so. However, foragers reoccupy locations for many reasons that are not economic in nature (Martínez-Tagüeña and Torres Cubillas 2018;Oetelaar and Oetelaar 2011). Certain places might have more cultural meaning than others, or there might be historic reasons why certain places over others are reoccupied.…”

Section: Amy E Clarkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments

Haas¹,

Kuhn²

2019

Current Anthropology

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As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure resource distributions on landscapes. Such resource restructuring would have played a nontrivial role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and emergent land-use patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which the habitual deposition of material resources at places on landscapes biases the future mobility decisions of energy-optimizing foragers. Thus foragers effectively construct the environments to which they adapt. With the aid of an agent-based model, this simple niche-construction model is used to deduce four predictions for emergent structure in hunter-gatherer settlement patterns. The predictions are tested against archaeological data from a hunter-gatherer settlement system in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru, 7,000-5,000 cal BP. Good agreement is found between the predicted and empirical patterns, demonstrating the model's efficacy and suggesting a behavioral explanation for structural properties of hunter-gatherer settlement systems. The nicheconstruction behavior and its self-organized properties may have been key components in the emergence of socioeconomic complexity in human societies. Places. .. are as much a part of us as we are part of them, and senses of place-yours, mine, and everyone else's-partake complexly of both. (Basso 1996:xiv) We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. (Culkin 1967:70, summarizing the work of Marshall McLuhan) Human mobility ranging from immobility to hypermobility is fundamental to the human experience. Mobility affects individual health, resource access, and social interaction across a continuum of spatial, temporal, demographic, and cultural scales (Kuhn, Raichlen, and Clark 2016; Salazar and Smart 2011). As important and pervasive a theme as it has become, studies of prehistoric mobility have a seemingly paradoxical element. Archaeologists cannot observe movement per se. Rather, they make inferences about mobility based on the spatial locations of materials that people carried and discarded, intentionally or unintentionally. Conclusions about movement are therefore typically grounded in more or less static distributions of debris on contemporary landscapes. This paper is specifically concerned with the decisions that mobile foragers, or hunter-gatherers, make about where to move on landscapes and how we can broadly recognize such mobility decisions in fragmentary records of cultural materials that were deposited by humans as they moved across ancient landscapes. Anthropological studies of forager mobility based on archaeological and ethnographic information have largely emphasized external drivers of mobility decisions. They have shown that natural resource structure accounts for many dimensions of forager mobility and land-use patterns. Environmental proxies such as biomass productivity, precipitation, temperature, and latitude are demonstrably successful in predicting population size, residential move frequency, residential move distances, territory size, group size, and te...

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Section: Amy E Clarkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments

Haas¹,

Kuhn²

2019

Current Anthropology

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“…The region that currently comprises Mexico was settled by small populations that rapidly grew after agriculture was implemented in Central Mexico [ 10 ]. Native Mexicans (NM) that settled in the North continued living mainly as hunter gatherers, a lifestyle not compatible with large populations [ 11 , 12 ]. The arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the XV century dramatically changed the population landscape of the whole American continent [ 13 ], such that contemporary people from Mexico are a heterogeneous admixed group of populations [ 14 ], composed by the genomic heritage from different regional NM backgrounds, Europeans, and, to a lesser extent, West African and Asian populations [ 15 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This cultural heterogeneity is paralleled by a genetic divergence revealed by genomic analyses; regionally, within a single continent, NM show a range of genomic differentiation comparable in scope to the differentiation between the European and East Asian continental populations [ 14 , 16 ]. Some of the NM groups, like the Seri, a northern population, have a particular history as hunter-gatherers, which combined with a cultural context favoring isolation, has probably shaped an interesting genomic context yet deeply unexplored [ 12 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whole genome variation in 27 Mexican indigenous populations, demographic and biomedical insights

et al. 2021

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There has been limited study of Native American whole genome diversity to date, which impairs effective implementation of personalized medicine and a detailed description of its demographic history. Here we report high coverage whole genome sequencing of 76 unrelated individuals, from 27 indigenous groups across Mexico, with more than 97% average Native American ancestry. On average, each individual has 3.26 million Single Nucleotide Variants and short indels, that together comprise a catalog of 9,737,152 variants, 44,118 of which are novel. We report 497 common Single Nucleotide Variants (with allele frequency > 5%) mapped to drug responses and 316,577 in enhancer or promoter elements; interestingly we found some of these enhancer variants in PPARG, a nuclear receptor involved in highly prevalent health problems in Mexican population, such as obesity, diabetes, and insulin resistance. By detecting signals of positive selection we report 24 enriched key pathways under selection, most of them related to immune mechanisms. No missense variants in ACE2, the receptor responsible for the entry of the SARS CoV-2 virus, were found in any individual. Population genomics and phylogenetic analyses demonstrated stratification in a Northern-Central-Southern axis, with major substructure in the Central region. The Seri, a northern group with the most genetic divergence in our study, showed a distinctive genomic context with the most novel variants, and the most population specific genotypes. Genome-wide analysis showed that the average haplotype blocks are longer in Native Mexicans than in other world populations. With this dataset we describe previously undetected population level variation in Native Mexicans, helping to reduce the gap in genomic data representation of such groups.

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“…They have retained knowledge of their cultural landscape and a deep connection with the archaeological record. They also possess a rich oral tradition and complex views of the natural order expressed in stories, poetry, and songs (e.g., Martínez-Tagüeña and Torres Cubillas 2018).…”

Section: The Mexican and Northwest Mexican Archaeological Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arqueología Incluyente

Martínez-Tagüeña

Sánchez²,

Carpenter³

et al. 2022

Adv. archaeol. pract.

Self Cite

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In Mexico, archaeological heritage belongs to all members of society, according to section XXV of Article 73 of the Mexican Constitution and Article 27 of the federal law on monuments and archaeological sites. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) was founded in 1939 as a federal government agency for the research, protection, and dissemination of archaeological heritage. Although this heritage belongs to all, stringent rules and procedures create an unequal relationship between career professionals and the diverse communities interested in the past (i.e., collectors, local museums, descendant communities). It is long due to begin practicing an inclusive archaeology that considers all the various knowledge systems (i.e., academic, technical, local, and traditional) of the communities interested in the past. Here, we describe case studies from Sonora, Mexico, to propose the implementation of several far-reaching activities with artifact collectors, Indigenous communities, researchers, archaeologists, and INAH Sonora authorities. Our pilot proposal needs to be implemented in other areas of Mexico that continue to prioritize archaeological narratives over other narratives about our past.

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Walking the desert, paddling the sea: Comcaac mobility in time

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments

Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments

Whole genome variation in 27 Mexican indigenous populations, demographic and biomedical insights

Arqueología Incluyente

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