Current Table of Contents

• Anthropological Currents
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 767-768, October 2008. <br/>
• Current Applications
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 769, October 2008. <br/>
• Variable Development of Dryland Agriculture in Hawaiʻi: A Fine‐Grained Chronology from the Kohala Field System, Hawaiʻi Island
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 771-802, October 2008. <br/> Research in the leeward Kohala dryland agricultural field system on Hawaiʻi Island provides the opportunity to develop a fine‐grained chronology for its development—both expansion and intensification—using a combination of chronometric and relative dating. Two pathways for agricultural development are identified for this field system, the first beginning as early as the fourteenth century and the second after the mid‐seventeenth century. This chronology, combined with dating for residential features, religious sites, and territorial boundaries, makes it possible to link agricultural change with social and political dynamics in the late prehistoric period. This sequence is compared to four other relatively well‐dated dryland field systems on the islands of Maui, Molokaʻi, and Hawaiʻi. These systems can be assigned to either of the two pathways identified for Kohala, suggesting that dryland agricultural strategies can be sorted into (1) an earlier expansion and subsequent intensification in areas where conditions were better suited for such practices and (2) a later, more rapid expansion into and more limited intensification of areas associated with greater costs or risks. The second and later pathway for agricultural development is linked to earlier increases in populations living in more optimal locations, movement or expansion of these populations into marginal zones, regional population integration, and increasing surplus demands to fund chiefly ambitions involving territorial expansion.
• Chronological Pollution: Potsherds, Mosques, and Broken Gods before and after the Conquest of Mexico
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 803-836, October 2008. <br/> Mary Douglas defined “dirt” as matter out of place, but dirt can be matter out of time as well. This essay uses the concept of chronological pollution to interrelate times and places often categorized as separate: pre‐Hispanic Mesoamerica; medieval Europe; and the Muslim, Christian, and Native American worlds of the sixteenth‐century transatlantic.
• Killing God: Exceptional Moments in the Colonial Missionary Encounter
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 837-860, October 2008. <br/> This paper pivots around an exceptional moment of colonial missionary encounter—the attempted “murder” in the 1930s of an incarnation of Samburu Divinity (pastoralists, northern Kenya). Examining this event through a comparative focus on other strange cases of “divinicide,” I elucidate certain key moments of intense metaphysical struggle that typically become effaced, forgotten, or flattened in the process of colonial witness. Focus on the ontological micropolitics of exceptional moments of the colonial encounter such as these affords us the opportunity to illuminate crucial, often elusive, even substantially forgotten dimensions of the unequal process by which shared cultural imaginaries are forged.
• Gender, Race, and Labor in the Archaeology of the Spanish Colonial Americas
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 861-893, October 2008. <br/> Gender and race are central to archaeological investigations of empire. In research on the Spanish colonization of the Americas, one prominent theory, the St. Augustine pattern, argues that cohabitation between Spanish men and Native American and African women in colonial households resulted in a distinctly gendered form of cultural transformation: indigenous, African, and syncretic cultural elements appear within private domestic activities associated with women; and European cultural elements are conservatively maintained in publicly visible male activities. This article reconsiders the St. Augustine pattern through analyses of new research that has revealed considerable diversity in the processes and outcomes of colonization throughout the Spanish Americas. Archaeological methodologies such as the St. Augustine pattern that rely on binary categories of analysis mask the complexity and ambiguity of material culture in colonial sites. Additionally, the abundance and ubiquity of indigenous, African, and syncretic material culture and foodstuffs in colonial households in the circum‐Caribbean indicate that macroscale economic, trade, and labor relationships, rather than household composition, were important causes of colonial cultural transformation in the Americas. An analytical focus on labor in colonial settings provides a multiscalar methodology that encompasses both institutional and household‐level entanglements between colonizers and colonized.
• Why Not Cognition?
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 895-897, October 2008. <br/>
• On the Report “From the Sunghir Children to the Romito Dwarf”
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 898-900, October 2008. <br/>
• Fertility and Agriculture Accentuate Sex Differences in Dental Caries Rates
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 901-914, October 2008. <br/> The transition from foraging to farming is associated with a widespread and well‐documented decline in oral health, wherein women experience a more rapid and dramatic decline than men. Historically, anthropologists have attributed this difference to behavioral factors such as sexual division of labor and gender‐based dietary preferences. However, the clinical and epidemiological literature on caries prevalence reveals a ubiquitous pattern of worse oral heath among women than men. Research on cariogenesis shows that women’s higher caries rates are influenced by changes in female sex hormones, the biochemical composition and flow rate of saliva, and food cravings and aversions during pregnancy. Significantly, the adoption of agriculture is associated with increased sedentism and fertility. I argue that the impact of dietary change on women’s oral health was intensified by the increased demands on women’s reproductive systems, including the increase in fertility, that accompanied the rise of agriculture and that these factors contribute to the observed gender differential in dental caries.
• Social Identities and Geographical Origins of Wari Trophy Heads from Conchopata, Peru
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 915-925, October 2008. <br/> The Wari empire (600–1000 CE) of the pre‐Hispanic Andes engaged in ritual practices that included the modification and display of human trophy heads, but it is unknown from whom these heads were taken. Of 31 trophy heads from Conchopata, the majority are of adult males, and 42% exhibit cranial trauma, indicating that people whose heads were transformed into trophies commonly experienced violence. Strontium isotope analysis of five adult trophy heads indicates that at least three of these individuals consumed foods grown in a geological zone outside the Wari heartland. These data, combined with information on age, sex, and violent life histories and iconography showing bound prisoners and warriors wearing trophy heads, suggest that at least some trophy heads represent individuals from nonlocal areas who may have been perceived as enemies.
• Conditions and Mechanisms for Peace in Precontact Polynesia
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 927-934, October 2008. <br/> An examination of interpersonal and intergroup violence in a selection of precontact Polynesian islands suggests that violence was lowest when two conditions were met. First, most peaceful islands had populations under about 1,000 people. Second, within this group, the most peaceful societies were those located more than 100 km from their nearest neighbor. The mechanisms by which peace was maintained in small societies included some measure of egalitarianism and direct representation in decision making, a rigorous program of individual sanctions of antisocial behavior, a network of gift‐generated mutual obligation, and a strong kinship network. Interpersonal violence and warfare were correlated in Polynesia, but rather than interpersonal violence creating a foundation for war, it would appear that warfare socialized violence within the society. Given the wide range of violence in Polynesian societies, all of which shared a common heritage, conflict appears to have been a cultural response to the geographic and environmental conditions in which a society found itself.
• Hunting with Dogs in Nicaragua: An Optimal Foraging Approach
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 935-944, October 2008. <br/> Although dogs are used by subsistence hunters in many locations throughout the world, hunters with dogs have not been studied from an optimal foraging perspective. A study of indigenous Mayangna and Miskito hunters in Nicaragua indicates that the use of dogs affects both the encounter rates and the pursuit times of several prey types. Before hunters can identify the prey type and initiate a pursuit, they must first catch up to the dogs, and their dogs sometimes chase unprofitable prey types. These costs are incorporated as an additional constraint in the optimal prey choice model. The results of the optimal foraging analysis indicate that hunters generally focus on prey types that are in the optimal diet set. However, hunters do not consume two rarely encountered species that are in the optimal diet set, giant anteaters and northern tamanduas. Although hunting with both rifles and dogs increases the likelihood of harvesting tapirs, the return rates of hunting with dogs, hunting with rifles, and hunting with both guns and dogs are otherwise comparable. This study therefore demonstrates that dogs can be valuable hunting accessories.
• Book Review: Christian Dilemmas beyond Locality (Keane's Christian Moderns and Engelke's A Problem of Presence)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 945-946, October 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Islands of African Memories (Wilkie and Farnsworth's Sampling Many Pots)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 946-948, October 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: One Long Argument (Cachel's Primate and Human Evolution)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 948, October 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Youth, State, and Cultural Globalization in Japan (Ambaras's Bad Youth and Condry's Hip‐Hop Japan)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 948-950, October 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Searching for the “Erotic” Other in Syria (Borneman's Syrian Episodes)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 950-952, October 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Making Collective Consciousness among the Lunda‐Ndembu of Mwinilunga (Pritchett's Friends for Life, Friends for Death)
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 952-953, October 2008. <br/>
• Books Received
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 953-956, October 2008. <br/>
• Erratum: Erratum
  Current Anthropology, Volume 49, Issue 5, Page 770, October 2008. <br/>