Paul Roscoe - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Roscoe

Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World, 2016

At contact, New Guinea was home to at least 30 forager groups of one kind or another. As one of t... more At contact, New Guinea was home to at least 30 forager groups of one kind or another. As one of the last regions on Earth to fall under colonial control, it therefore provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine how and with what consequences foraging communities engaged with colonial and post-colonial forces. Their experiences were profoundly shaped by a complex conjunction between local subsistence regimes and the logistics of colonial expansion. Groups located on waterways depended on wild sago and aquatic resources and comprised some of the largest villages in all New Guinea. They were also easily accessible to colonial vessels, however, and were therefore some of the earliest and the most profoundly affected by contact. Groups that depended on wild sago and terrestrial fauna, by contrast, formed small, low density, semi-mobile polities, and because they were isolated in the swamplands of the interior, they were among the last and least influenced of New Guinea's communities. This chapter traces the historical contours of these different conjunctions and follows the chains of transformation they set in motion, from the initial and profound consequences of the suppression of indigenous warfare, through the economic effects of a burgeoning engagement with capitalist economies, to their impact on the political and cosmological realms of forager society.

The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, 2017

Nearest neighbour travel time against population density. 2.1. BaYaka playgroups tend to consist ... more Nearest neighbour travel time against population density. 2.1. BaYaka playgroups tend to consist of a broad range of ages and genders. 2.2. Flowchart of potential relationships in egalitarian or non-egalitarian social structures. 2.3. Flowchart of potential relationships in egalitarian or non-egalitarian social structures. 3.1. Illustrative example of the possible effect of mixed-sibling co-residence on the relatedness of groups. 3.2. Number of camps in which the average household is permitted to live. 5.1. Composition and kinship relationships of five hunting crews in Wales. 6.1. A Hadza man whittling a bow. 6.2. A map of the distribution of hand spears and spearthrowers throughout Australia. 6.3. A map of the recent historic distribution of blowdart use throughout the Old World. 6.4. A map of the recent historic distribution of blowdart use throughout the Americas. 7.1. Delayed return as a composite category. 8.1. A sketch of an Elk secret society dancer among the Ogalala Sioux on the American Plains. 8.2. Bone flutes used to represent the voices of spirits in Californian secret society rituals. 8.3. The interior of an Egbo ritual house of the Ekoi tribe in Nigeria. 8.4. The interior of an Egbo ritual house at Akangba, Nigeria. 8.5. The 'Sorcerer' from Les Trois Frères Cave in France. 8.6. Small dolmen containing the skull of a high-ranking member of a secret society on Vanuatu. 8.7. One of the skull cups recovered from the Solutrean deposits in Le Placard. 9.1. Net Primary Productivity and Effective Temperature conditions for extant fisher-hunter-gatherers. 138-9 9.2. Spatio-temporal distributions of NPP and ET in Upper Palaeolithic Europe. 140-1 9.3. Number of days per year with (growing) temperatures above 0°C, 5°C and 10°C. 142-3 9.4. Reconstructed population densities. 9.5.

A large number of contacts were made with colleagues and personnel at archives and libraries in t... more A large number of contacts were made with colleagues and personnel at archives and libraries in the US and abroad. For details, please see under MAJOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ACTIVITIES OF THE PROJECT. Activities and Findings Project Activities and Findings: NSF funding was granted to help pursue a research project entitled, 'Society and Military Practice in Sepik and Highland New Guinea.' This project aims to assemble and analyze textual and coded databases concerning indigenous warfare in two regions of contact-era New Guinea, the Sepik Basin and the Highlands. To begin with, NSF support was requested for full support of two aspects of this project: A).the collection of archival and other data, much of it unpublished, from collections around the world that were difficult or impossible to access from the University of Maine; B).the construction from these and other documents already in hand of large text-based databases on New-Guinea warfare and on topics related to a series of hypotheses about this warfare. One aim of the project was to get these databases into a shape that could then be shared with other researchers.

Consumption, Status, and Sustainability, 2021

Form, Macht, Differenz, 2009

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020

Radiocarbon summed probability distribution (SPD) methods promise to illuminate the role of demog... more Radiocarbon summed probability distribution (SPD) methods promise to illuminate the role of demography in shaping prehistoric social processes, but theories linking population indices to social organization are still uncommon. Here, we develop Power Theory, a formal model of political centralization that casts population density and size as key variables modulating the interactive capacity of political agents to construct power over others. To evaluate this argument, we generated an SPD from 755 radiocarbon dates for 10 000–1000 BP from Central, North Central and North Coast Peru, a period when Peruvian political form developed from ‘quasi-egalitarianism’ to state levels of political centralization. These data are congruent with theoretical expectations of the model but also point to an artefactual distortion previously unremarked in SPD research. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

Echoes of the Tambaran: Masculinity, history and the subject in the work of Donald F. Tuzin, Oct 1, 2011

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2017

To support their hypothesis, the authors point to an inverse correlation between latitude and the... more To support their hypothesis, the authors point to an inverse correlation between latitude and the incidence of civil conflict and crime. This observation cannot be accepted as evidence for the hypothesis, because of a weighty confounding variable: the historical geography of colonialism and its effects on the fragility of nations.

Oceania, 1999

Over the last 15 years or so, ‘raskols’ have become a prominent feature of the cultural scene in ... more Over the last 15 years or so, ‘raskols’ have become a prominent feature of the cultural scene in Papua New Guinea and have prompted a number of academic studies, focussed mostly on urban crime. This paper documents and analyses a dramatic rise of raskolism in a rural setting, the Yangoru Subdistrict of the East Sepik Province. It seeks to describe how interactions between raskols and the population they exploit evolved, and it focusses on why Yangoru raskolism emerged when it did. Although a conjunction of rising material aspirations, failed economic programs, and the erosion of traditional and modern sanctions probably are important explanations, what seems critical to understanding this sudden rise in crime is the experience some young Yangoru men gained in raskol gangs in urban environments, experience that facilitated their recognition and exploitation of pre-existing but hitherto unacknowledged weaknesses in the systems of control back home.

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, 2003

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1995

... it is that individual Yangoru Boiken groups go to the trouble of constructing them, than we w... more ... it is that individual Yangoru Boiken groups go to the trouble of constructing them, than we would through supposing that these buildings com-municate unconscious or non-verbal messages, as Forge had argued of the closely related Abe-lam structures. Roscoe performs a ...

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2012

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Bu... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2009

Small-scale society furnishes the bread and butter of archeological research. Yet our understandi... more Small-scale society furnishes the bread and butter of archeological research. Yet our understanding of what these communities did and how they achieved their purpose is still rudimentary. Using the ethnography of contact-era New Guinea, this paper presents a "social signaling" model of small-scale social systems that archeologists may find useful for contextualizing and interpreting the material record of these societies. It proposes that the organization of small-scale society was oriented, among other goals, towards biological and social reproduction, subsistence optimization, and military defense. To advance these multiple collective interests, however, these communities had to deal with three problems: an optimality problem, a conflictof-interest problem, and a free-rider problem. The optimality problem was solved with a modular (or segmented) social structure, the conflict-of-interest problem by a process of social signaling, and these two solutions together operated to resolve the free-rider problems they created. In addition to explaining the structure and function of small-scale societies, the model provides a unified framework that can account for the ceremonial behaviors, core cultural conceptions, and leadership forms that these societies generated.

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2008

Ethnology, 1989

Page 1. THE PIG AND THE LONG YAM: THE EXPANSION OF A SEPIK CULTURAL COMPLEX1Paul B. Roscoe Univer... more Page 1. THE PIG AND THE LONG YAM: THE EXPANSION OF A SEPIK CULTURAL COMPLEX1Paul B. Roscoe University of Maine That human communities cannot be treated as a mosaic of isolated ... expertise - were people with whom the Yangoru Boiken were at war. By the ...

Cross-Cultural Research, 2004

Discussants are usually given the last word, and justly so. It is a task in itself to try to inte... more Discussants are usually given the last word, and justly so. It is a task in itself to try to integrate a set of articles and then move them forward; to have a discussant who is also willing to let authors pick over his or her efforts is rare indeed. I doubt I am the only contributor, therefore, who is doubly grateful to Read—for shouldering the traditional task and for agreeing to allow us our critical returns. Read’s principal critique, focused mainly on the articles by Peregrine, Ember, and Ember and by Graber, concerns the validity of empirically projecting the past into the future. Like several previous theorists (Hart, Naroll, Marano, and Carneiro), these contributors have taken empirical trends in past political integration and, with various statistical tweaking, projected them forward to pinpoint future global unification. Read finds these approaches inadequate because the authors do not justify their assumption that past trends will continue without major change. “Without an adequate theory that accounts both for why fusion or coalescence of societies should take place and for why fissioning of societies occurs, these projections are simply conjectures, not rigorous estimates” (Read, 2004 [this issue]). Read’s cautions on the dangers of empirical projection are certainly sound, and I should doubt that any contributor would disagree with them. But his diagnosis of the problem and his prescription for a solution—an “adequate” theory of political integration to underwrite the projections—are epistemologically problematic, as fraught, in fact, as the practices he criticizes. Read’s critique is Popper’s critique of inductivism: We cannot assume from the fact that the sun has always risen in the past that it will do so tomorrow, for the next 300 years, or whatever. Read’s proposed remedy