The Signature of Starvation: A Comparison of Bone Processing at a Chinese Encampment in Montana and the Donner Party Camp in California

Messy Data, Ordered Questions

“…In North America, data continue to be generated lending support to the presence of humans previous to the Clovis tool tradition (Waters, et al 2011), and several articles have focused on technological adaptations and mobility strategies. In an analysis of lithics from 83 Paleo‐Indian sites (11,000–10,000 BP) in northeastern North America, Christopher Ellis (2011) showed the diversity of environments and resources that humans living during the late Pleistocene exploited. Rather than relying on specialized procurement parties to obtain raw materials, humans obtained resources from upward of 200 km during annual migrations.…”

“Should We Have Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata ... or a Hot Dinner?” Resource Stress as an Alternative to the Abandonment of Peel Town, Swan River Colony, 1829–1830

“…However, few examine or attempt to identify signs in the archaeological record suggesting stress related behavior. The research on the Donner Party trapped in snowbound Sierra Nevada (Hardesty 1997;Dixon et al 2011;Ellis et al 2011) and Blanton's (2000Blanton's ( , 2003 and Rockman's (2010) research into Jamestown during the initial colonizing phase are the best known, with Gibbs' (2003) analysis framed towards maritime disasters the exceptions. Testing the archaeological signature for evidence of stress that led to the abandonment of Peel town is this study's major driver, encapsulated within seminal questions about how quickly colonists learned about resources in a new area, the appropriateness of a colonizer's culture to a new environment and, from a material perspective, what the objects left behind represent about the effectiveness of knowledge gathering (Rockman 2003(Rockman :3, 2010.…”

Studies in Forensic Biohistory

“…However, event-based research can also figure prominently in regional imagining of the past. For example, analyses of the human remains associated with the ill-fated Donner party (Dixon et al, 2010;Ellis et al, 2011;Grayson, 1990), the deceit of Alferd (or Alfred) Packer (Rautman and Fenton, 2005;Starrs and Ramsland, 2005), the Willie Handcart Company disaster (Grayson, 1996), the Mountain Meadows massacre (Novak, 2008(Novak, , 2014Novak and Kopp, 2003;Novak and Rodseth, 2006;Perego and Woodward, 2006;Perego et al, 2012), and the battle of the Little Big Horn (Scott and Snow, 1996;Snow and Fitzpatrick, 1989) all figure into the mythos of the American West (Dixon, 2014;Stuckey, 2011). It is noteworthy that the most high-profile attempts at biohistorical individuation from Western states (Jesse James - Stone et al, 2001;Billy the Kid -Komar, 2006;Komar and Buikstra, 2008;Edwin and William Kiel -Brooks and Brooks, 1984;Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -Meadows, 2003;Williams, 2013) evoke similar images of the "wild" and "outlaw" and speak directly to public imagining of the West.…”