A Sense of Question: Papers in Honor of James F. O'Connell

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Klein.

About 50,000 years ago, modern humans expanded from Africa to Eurasia. Significant behavioral change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists commonly seek its roots in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) before 50,000 years ago. Easily recognizable art objects and "jewelry" become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors. Population growth is the most popular explanation for these precursors and for the post-MSA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard.

Identifying the causes of spatiotemporal variation in technological richness and complexity is an important task for archaeology. James O’Connell has proposed that diet breadth can be expected to affect investment in subsistence technology and therefore the number and intricacy of subsistence tools. Narrower diets, he suggests, will be associated with lower investment and therefore fewer and/or less complex tools, while broader diets will be associated with higher investment and therefore more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Hawkes.

O’Connell’s Hadza work shows how combining behavioral ecology with ethnoarchaeology magnifies the power of ethnography to help interpret the past. O’Connell’s systematic observations and analyses of Hadza hunting and treatment of big game gave us robust falsification of received notions about our ancestral past, including ideas about scavenging, variation in faunal assemblages, and prey transport. His vision as both an archaeologist and ethnographer extracted the richest kind of evolutionary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter White.

Rather than being just a set of warnings, ethnoarchaeology has made major contributions to a range of archaeological endeavours, especially in Papua New Guinea and Australia. These include broadening our view of stone and wood technologies, of site formation processes and of human-environment relations. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Simms. Andrew Ugan.

The application of HBE and selection thinking can shed light on the study of intensification. This vantage treats intensification as a process, not a threshold, and treats behavior not as normative cultural forms (e.g., "intensive farmers"), but as fluctuating frequencies among alternative adaptive strategies comprising a behavioral mix that may be culturally encoded. There are many ways to work hard. Here we employ case studies from Mendoza, Argentina, and the Great Basin, Southwest, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only K. Ann Horsburgh.

Over the span of his career, Jim O’Connell has shown us by example how advances in genetics can help us better model prehistory when considered alongside archaeological evidence. In this paper I reflect on his career to highlight the way in which science currently considers genetic and archaeological evidence together to (1) create or refine culture historical models of population movement and demography, and (2) to develop insight in to the relationship between hunter-gatherers and their food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dave Schmitt. Karen Lupo.

Zooarchaeological applications of rationale derived from the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. The PCM predicts dietary expansion and contraction in response to the encounter rates with large-sized and highly ranked game. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as reflecting changes in foraging efficiency and are usually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Elston.

Jim O’Connell began his professional career in anthropology as a Berkeley graduate student under Robert Heizer, conducting his dissertation (1971) research on the prehistory of Surprise Valley in NE California. A teaching position at UC Riverside (1970-72) was soon supplanted by a research fellowship (1973-78) in Prehistory at Australian National University during which he pursued ethnoarchaeological research among the Alyawara. In 1978, he joined the Anthropology Department at the University of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bird.

O’Connell is best known for championing an approach to exploring the evolution of human behavior and its attendant archaeological patterns through the distinctive lens of human behavioral ecology. His contributions in developing ways to operationalize theory for generating testable hypotheses about big questions in the human experience have indelibly shifted the trajectory of empirically bent studies of subsistence. However, far less appreciated are his keen ethnographic descriptions of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Codding. Christopher Parker. Rebecca Bliege Bird. David Zeanah. Douglas Bird.

In his watershed 1995 publication, O’Connell outlined the utility of approaching ethnoarchaeology through a general theory of behavior by noting the disparity between studies examining faunal remains and those attempting to explain site structure. While the former was finding great success by drawing on models from behavioral ecology, the later was stagnant and lacking a general theory of behavior. Drawing on ethnoarchaeological data collected with Martu Aboriginal foragers, we highlight a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Stiner. Steven Kuhn.

Short-term constraints that motivate people are an important part of the process social and economic change. Proximate decision (optimality or satisficing) models are particularly useful in archaeology because they play upon basic resource needs and costs in situations where behavior cannot be observed directly. These models are not enough, however, to account for the larger processes by which repeated interactions change the nature of the co-evolving species and the conditions of selection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah. Brian F. Codding. Douglas W. Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird.

O’Connell (JOC) was among the first to recognize the potential of optimal foraging theory (OFT) as a research strategy for investigating the Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR). His work in Australia carried profound implications for the BSR that stimulated research particularly in the Great Basin and Australia. Although testing predictions in the archaeological record has proved challenging, these studies revealed aspects of the BSR not anticipated by simple foraging models. Recently, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Allen.

Jim O'Connell arrived in Australia in 1973 to take up a five year research fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Although he returned to the US in 1978, O'Connell has not only maintained diverse interests in Australia and its archaeological record but has also returned there perhaps 25 times to carry out fieldwork, present papers at conferences and to interact with colleagues. It is clear that some of O'Connell's major contributions to world anthropology have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Field.

The extinction of megafauna across the globe generates lively and sometimes heated discussion on timing and cause. In the case of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea), the debate is divided into two distinct camps – those that hold a firm belief that humans were responsible, and those that consider the current datasets to thin to provide any definitive answer. These big picture issues are reliant on the acquisition of data from individual sites and data on megafauna comes predominantly from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Meltzer.

In their 2012 paper, 'The restaurant at the end of the universe,' O’Connell and Allen developed a speculative and far-reaching model for the colonization of Sahul, one that sees initial populations as small, spatially concentrated in scattered ‘sweet’ spots, and which exhibited only occasional growth spurts and geographic expansion along extant coastlines. Although granting the obvious differences between the environmental stage and historical conditions under which the Pleistocene colonization...