This study examines intra-settlement social inequality across 73 Mumun settlements (ca. 1500–1 BCE) on the southern Korean Peninsula using the Gini index and Lorenz curve. House size and pottery density are employed as proxies for socioeconomic power and the capacity for food storage and sharing, respectively. The analysis reveals a nuanced understanding of Mumun social complexity. Variations in house

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Previous analysis of skeletal indicators of physical activity suggested that the population at Tombos, an Egyptian colonial town in Nubia, may have benefited from an imperial framework through occupations that were not physically demanding. With more than ten years of continued excavations, coupled with further biomolecular testing, we reanalyze entheseal changes at Tombos. We compare entheseal changes

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Volume 66, Issue 1, February 2025.

Current Anthropology, Volume 66, Issue 1, February 2025.

Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked

This article offers ‘stages’, an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi‐level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing ‘stages’ as a concept/pun

This article develops a more‐than‐human conception of charisma to explain the interrelated magnetism of palaeontologists and prehistoric megafauna in the United States since the nineteenth century. It extends anthropological analysis of charisma to non‐human bodies, and argues that charisma is created by more‐than‐human processes involving tactile interactions among people and matter within particular

This article presents the latest results of a collaborative project that seeks to develop recommendations for policymakers on migration by drawing upon the incomparable dataset accessible to archaeologists. While prior archaeological research on migration has provided important theoretical insights, our policy-oriented goals required us to adopt different terminology and analytical frameworks. How

Archaeological narratives of migrations in pre-Colonial North America rely on cultural materials, which often only convey relative temporalities and tempos of these dynamic events. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling to examine a pattern of immigration into a cultural frontier during the 14th through the 16th centuries AD in what is today southwest Virginia, USA. Incorporation of prior

Macroevolutionary analysis provides the opportunity to ask questions concerning the major patterns of long-term continuity and change in the cultural record. In this study, we address the evolution of lithic technological operational strategies spanning the last 20,000 years primarily in the northwestern and northern portions of North America. We measure systemic technological variation on a maximum

History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture

In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive

The archaeology of diaspora has grown in many directions during the first two decades of the 21st century. It has become a key way of understanding the short-term and long-term connections between people and communities defined by movement and migration. However, archaeologists of diaspora still at times struggle with old models of interpretation which seek out ethnic markers in material culture or

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Architectural studies are of great interest in considering variations in social phenomena. This ethnoarchaeological program therefore focuses on the evolution of building techniques, both in relation to the recent prehistory of Western Asia, and the current context through field surveys carried out in Djibouti. The aim of this article is to present the results of our study conducted in the Gobaad basin

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head‐switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly

A set of visual representations and marks made on the red plastered floor within a domestic enclosure, are analyzed. They belong to low scale agro-pastoralist societies that inhabited the Argentine Puna in the South Central Andes, ca. 1500 BP. The prepared floor would have configured a proper surface for a multisensory ritual performance. This type of material is reserved for specific places such as

In 2012 the US government began requiring DNA testing in its Refugee Family Reunification Program, which was primarily used by refugees from African countries. The policy was established to allay concerns that refugees were committing “family‐composition fraud,” or including people outside their families in their resettlement and reunification cases. In humanitarian contexts “fraud” has often been

This article seeks to develop a formal framework for studying the American Jewish diaspora archaeologically, using Alexandria, Virginia’s turn of the 20th century community as a case study. Moving beyond simple ethnic markers and tacking among several analytical scales, this approach explores how material culture and space both reflected and helped create new social identities. A few themes emerge

This study examines the subsistence strategies of Archaic Period inhabitants (9.0–3.5 cal. ka) of the Lake Titicaca Basin, located in the high Andes of South America. Faunal data from three Archaic Period sites in the Ilave region of Peru are used to explore the dietary habits of early foragers spanning over five millennia. Comparative analysis reveals heavy investment in camelids, with deer serving

Recent rock art research in the Pali Aike volcanic field (PAVF, southern Argentina and Chile) expanded the chronology (ca. 3100B.P.) and morphological and technical repertoire of abstract-geometric and figurative paintings of the “Río Chico style”. This paper discusses the spatial distribution of painted motifs to understand the criteria that guided the representation strategies and the flow of information

This paper explores the role of Lutheran ritual in value formations in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools, subsidized by the state, offer gap year programs that are meant to instil values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Christian folk high school in south‐eastern Norway

Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, Page 1121-1122, December 2024.

Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, December 2024.

Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, December 2024.

The Economic Defendability Model posits that foragers exploiting dense and predictable resources should establish defended territories, while foragers exploiting unpredictable resources manage shortfall risk by ranging across larger areas that they do not invest in defending. While these expectations are supported by ethnographic observations, archaeological tests have been limited to peri-aquatic

The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or