Calculating the Cultural Significance of American Indian Plants: Paiute and Shoshone Ethnobotany at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Ethnobotanical studies are of interest to ethnographers, ethnobotanists, and cultural historians who study the prehistoric, historic, and contemporary contribution of plants to the sociocultural adaptations of American Indian people. A critical research issue is evaluating the differential contribution of plants to American Indian adaptive strategies. This article takes the first quantitative plant evaluation model and combines it with field data from the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, ethnobotany study to explore the utility of this model for evaluating the cultural significance of botanical resources to contemporary American Indian peoples.     

Ghost Dancing the Grand Canyon. Southern Paiute Rock Art, Ceremony, and Cultural Landscapes

Combining rock art studies with ethnohistory, contemporary ethnographic analysis, and the interpretations of people who share the cultural traditions being studied, this paper documents a rock art site in Kanab Creek Canyon that appears to have been the location of a Ghost Dance ceremony performed by Southern Paiute and perhaps Hualapai people in the late 1800s. Using the site as a point of departure, it focuses on the way in which synergistic associations among place, artifact, resources, events, and historic and contemporary Indian people contribute to the construction of a contextual cultural landscape.     

Reefs from space: Satellite imagery,marine ecology,and ethnography in the Dominican Republic

Coral reef bleaching is an obvious indication that coastal marine ecosystems are being stressed. However, bleached reefs alone are poor indicators because they reflect the final stages of stress. This research project used multidate satellite imagery to look for coral reef changes as indicators of stress. Findings suggest that (1) satellite imagery can be used to identify small-scale changes in coastal marine ecosystems, including coral reefs; (2) remote sensing, marine ecology, and ethnographic data can be integrated to suggest potential causes of coral reef stress; and (3) changes in reef, seagrass, and mangrove ecozones are more closely tied to fishing, tourism, and land use practices than to global warming.