raymond mauldin | University of Texas at San Antonio (original) (raw)
Papers by raymond mauldin
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2002
The Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) of The University of Texas at San Antonio contracted... more The Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) of The University of Texas at San Antonio contracted with the city of San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department to conduct data recovery excavations at site 41BX1412 in McAllister Park, northeast San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. Data recovery excavations were initiated at the site in order to mitigate the impact of the construction-related disturbances that would result from the proposed expansion of Bee Tree Drive towards Starcrest Drive at the southeastern edge of the park. The expansion of Bee Tree Drive could not be redesigned to avert impact to 41BX1412, a multicomponent archaeological site recorded during a survey conducted in 2000 by CAR personnel. The data recovery efforts consisted of the investigation of a total of 128.5 m 2 of the site. The fieldwork was carried out between September 22 and 29, 2000, under Texas Antiquities Permit Number 2466. Steve A. Tomka served as project archaeologist. Testing suggested the presence of an Early Archaic, and a possible late Paleoindian, component at the site. Data recovery excavations revealed no intact features. More importantly, the excavations indicated that although an Early Archaic cultural zone may exist at the site, buried some 60 cm below surface, no in situ temporal diagnostics were recovered from this zone. Unexpectedly, the data recovery efforts yielded Middle Archaic temporal diagnostics but no intact deposits. A number of lines of evidence suggest that the site has undergone significant disturbance, most likely during the original construction of Bee Tree Drive. The results of the fieldwork and analysis suggest that the site has been heavily disturbed and does not warrant listing to the National Register of Historic Places nor designation as a State Archeological Landmark.
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2011
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2009
Southern African Humanities, 2016
Recent zooarchaeological and aDNA analysis have produced conflicting evidence for the existence o... more Recent zooarchaeological and aDNA analysis have produced conflicting evidence for the existence of early domestic stock at Blydefontein Rock Shelter. The anatomical analysis identified eight specimens as sheep or sheep/goats, the oldest of which was dated to 2860–2765 BP, while the aDNA results suggest that the oldest identified sheep specimen was either greater kudu or eland. Almost all of the other aDNA identifications conflicted with the anatomical assessments. The faunal and aDNA analyses are presented in separate papers in this journal. This paper provides background information on the site of Blydefontein, and frames the discussion in terms of the reliability and validity of the anatomical and aDNA evidence.
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2003
All rights reserved TxDOT and CAR-UTSA jointly own all rights, title, and interest in and to all ... more All rights reserved TxDOT and CAR-UTSA jointly own all rights, title, and interest in and to all data and other information developed for this project under Contract 570XXPD004. Brief passages from this publication may be reproduced without permission provided that credit is given to TxDOT and CAR-UTSA. Permission to reprint an entire chapter, section, figures or tables must be obtained in advance from the Supervisor of the Archeological Studies Program,
The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015
The Holocene, Jul 7, 2023
We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human po... more We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human populations: The intensification of production generates a tradeoff between the adaptive capacity of individuals to generate a surplus of energy to maximize their fitness in the short-run and the long-term capacity of a population as a whole to experience a smooth transition into a demographic equilibrium. The model reconciles the conflicting insights of dynamic systems models of human population change, and we conduct a preliminary test of this model’s implications in Central Texas by developing time-series that estimate changes in human population density, modeled ecosystem productivity, human diet, and labor over the last 12,500 years. Our analysis indicates that Texas hunter-gatherers experienced three long-term population growth overshoots and recessions into quasi equilibria. Evidence indicates that each of these overshoots and recessions associate with changes in diet and labor devoted to processing high density, lower quality resources to unlock calories and nutrients. Over the long-term, population recessions may be necessary for populations to experiment with social and physical infrastructure changes that raise the carrying capacity of their environment.
The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2019
Despite years of debate, the factors that control the long-term carrying capacity of human popula... more Despite years of debate, the factors that control the long-term carrying capacity of human populations are not well understood. In this paper, we assess the effect of changes in resource extraction and climate driven changes in ecosystem productivity on the carrying capacity of hunter-gatherer populations in a terrestrial and coastal ecosystem. To make this assessment, we build time-series estimates of changes in resource extraction via human stable isotopes and ecosystem productivity via paleoclimate models and geomorphic records of flood events. These estimates of resource extraction and ecosystem productivity allow us to assess a complex model of population expansion that proposes linked changes between population density, resource extraction, and intensification. We find that changes in resource extraction had a larger effect on carrying capacity in both the terrestrial and coastal ecosystems than climate drivers of ecosystem productivity. Our results are consistent with the idea that both Malthusian limits on resources and Boserupian pressures to reorganize economic systems operate in hunter-gatherer populations over the long-term. Our data and analysis contribute to evaluating complex models of population growth and subsistence change across archaeological cases.
PLOS ONE, Jul 11, 2019
Taking inspiration from the archaeology of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), we develop an ecologica... more Taking inspiration from the archaeology of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), we develop an ecological theory of population distribution among mobile hunter-gatherers. This theory proposes that, due to the heterogeneity of resources in space and time, foragers create networks of habitats that they access through residential cycling and shared knowledge. The degree of cycling that individuals exhibit in creating networks of habitats, encoded through social relationships, depends on the relative scarcity of resources and fluctuations in those resources. Using a dynamic model of hunter-gatherer population distribution, we illustrate that increases in population density, coupled with shocks to a biophysical or social system, creates a selective environment that favors habitat partitioning and investments in social mechanisms that control the residential cycling of foragers on a landscape. Our work adds a layer of realism to Ideal Distribution Models by adding a time allocation decision process in a variable environment and illustrates a general variance reduction, safe-operating space tradeoff among mobile human foragers that drives social change.
Quaternary International, Aug 1, 2017
The adaptive cycle, a seminal component of resilience theory, is a powerful model that archaeolog... more The adaptive cycle, a seminal component of resilience theory, is a powerful model that archaeologists use to understand the persistence and transformation of prehistoric societies. In this paper, we argue that resilience theory will have a more enduring explanatory role in archaeology if scholars can build on the initial insights of the adaptive cycle model and create more contextualized hypotheses of socialecological change. By contextualized hypotheses we mean testable hypotheses that specify: (1) the form of the connections among people and ecological elements and how those connections change; and (2) the resilience-vulnerability tradeoffs associated with changes in the networks and institutions that link social and ecological processes. To develop such a contextualized hypothesis, we combine our knowledge of the prehistory of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), mathematical modeling, and the concept of panarchy to study why human societies successfully cope with the interrelated forces of globalization, population growth, and climate change, and, sometimes, fail to cope with these interrelated forces. Our hypothesis is that, in response to population growth, hunter-gatherers on the TCP created increasingly dense social networks that allowed individuals to maintain residual access to important sources of food. While this was a good strategy for individuals to maintain a reliable supply of food in a variable environment, increasingly elaborate social networks created a panarchy of reachable forager-resource systems. The panarchy of forager-resource systems on the TCP created a hidden fragility: The potential for the failure of resources in one system to cascade from system-to-system across the entire TCP. We propose that this occurred around 700 years BP, causing a 6000 year old ritual and mortuary complex to reorganize.
Antiquity, Dec 1, 1995
A complement to a paper early in this year's volume of ANTIQUITY reports experience with sear... more A complement to a paper early in this year's volume of ANTIQUITY reports experience with searching for blood-residue traces with the services of a commercial testing laboratory.
Journal of Anthropological Research, Jul 1, 1988
This volume, a monograph in the New Studies in Archaeology Series, is a revised version of the au... more This volume, a monograph in the New Studies in Archaeology Series, is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation from the University of New Mexico completed in 1980. It is an attempt to develop a model of adaptive change and apply it to archaeological material ...
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
In February, March, and May of 2001, personnel from the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR),... more In February, March, and May of 2001, personnel from the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR), The University of Texas at San Antonio, conducted a cultural resource inventory survey, involving pedestrian survey and shovel testing, of an approximately 90-acre (364,060 m 2) tract of land in a plowed field on Camp Bowie, Brown County, Texas. A total of 104 shovel tests were systematically placed within the 90-acre area. The survey identified three prehistoric sites, all lithic scatters defined by surface material. Twelve additional shovel tests were placed on these three sites. An arrow point fragment, collected from the surface of 41BR499, suggests a Late Prehistoric affiliation for this site. Dart points collected from 41BR500 suggest a Late Archaic use of this area. Finally, an arrow point, collected from 41BR501, suggests a Late Prehistoric component at this site. In addition, a single whole mano was collected from the surface of 41BR500.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Sep 1, 2021
Abstract Describing and explaining the population growth trajectories of prehistoric hunter-gathe... more Abstract Describing and explaining the population growth trajectories of prehistoric hunter-gatherers is an important research problem. Large radiocarbon data sets provide one empirical starting point for describing these trajectories; however, explaining trajectories of growth must always take place within the context of theory. In this paper, we formalize a ratchet model of long-term, mean population growth among hunter-gatherers and evaluate the plausibility of that model using two extensive radiocarbon data sets from Central Texas and the Texas Coastal Plain. Our analysis suggests that hunter-gatherer populations in these regions displayed waves of population growth separated by periods of population saturation and competition for resources. Our model and results suggest that hunter-gatherer populations in Texas may have experienced multiple demographic transitions to successively higher levels of population saturation (carrying capacity). Our results derive from a general model, a set of methods applicable across archaeological regions, and provide a basis for hypotheses that may explain changes in the socioecology of hunter-gatherers.
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
The survey was conducted in conjunction with repair of existing seepage at Twin Buttes Dam. The r... more The survey was conducted in conjunction with repair of existing seepage at Twin Buttes Dam. The repair, conducted under the Safety of Dams program, involved the construction of several borrow pits. Since the Safety of Dams repair required BOR to inventory several areas of the reservoir lands under Section 106 of the NHPA, it was decided to expand the Section 106 work, and do the entire Section 110 survey of the reservoir.
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2002
The Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) of The University of Texas at San Antonio contracted... more The Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) of The University of Texas at San Antonio contracted with the city of San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department to conduct data recovery excavations at site 41BX1412 in McAllister Park, northeast San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. Data recovery excavations were initiated at the site in order to mitigate the impact of the construction-related disturbances that would result from the proposed expansion of Bee Tree Drive towards Starcrest Drive at the southeastern edge of the park. The expansion of Bee Tree Drive could not be redesigned to avert impact to 41BX1412, a multicomponent archaeological site recorded during a survey conducted in 2000 by CAR personnel. The data recovery efforts consisted of the investigation of a total of 128.5 m 2 of the site. The fieldwork was carried out between September 22 and 29, 2000, under Texas Antiquities Permit Number 2466. Steve A. Tomka served as project archaeologist. Testing suggested the presence of an Early Archaic, and a possible late Paleoindian, component at the site. Data recovery excavations revealed no intact features. More importantly, the excavations indicated that although an Early Archaic cultural zone may exist at the site, buried some 60 cm below surface, no in situ temporal diagnostics were recovered from this zone. Unexpectedly, the data recovery efforts yielded Middle Archaic temporal diagnostics but no intact deposits. A number of lines of evidence suggest that the site has undergone significant disturbance, most likely during the original construction of Bee Tree Drive. The results of the fieldwork and analysis suggest that the site has been heavily disturbed and does not warrant listing to the National Register of Historic Places nor designation as a State Archeological Landmark.
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2011
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2009
Southern African Humanities, 2016
Recent zooarchaeological and aDNA analysis have produced conflicting evidence for the existence o... more Recent zooarchaeological and aDNA analysis have produced conflicting evidence for the existence of early domestic stock at Blydefontein Rock Shelter. The anatomical analysis identified eight specimens as sheep or sheep/goats, the oldest of which was dated to 2860–2765 BP, while the aDNA results suggest that the oldest identified sheep specimen was either greater kudu or eland. Almost all of the other aDNA identifications conflicted with the anatomical assessments. The faunal and aDNA analyses are presented in separate papers in this journal. This paper provides background information on the site of Blydefontein, and frames the discussion in terms of the reliability and validity of the anatomical and aDNA evidence.
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State, 2003
All rights reserved TxDOT and CAR-UTSA jointly own all rights, title, and interest in and to all ... more All rights reserved TxDOT and CAR-UTSA jointly own all rights, title, and interest in and to all data and other information developed for this project under Contract 570XXPD004. Brief passages from this publication may be reproduced without permission provided that credit is given to TxDOT and CAR-UTSA. Permission to reprint an entire chapter, section, figures or tables must be obtained in advance from the Supervisor of the Archeological Studies Program,
The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015
The Holocene, Jul 7, 2023
We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human po... more We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human populations: The intensification of production generates a tradeoff between the adaptive capacity of individuals to generate a surplus of energy to maximize their fitness in the short-run and the long-term capacity of a population as a whole to experience a smooth transition into a demographic equilibrium. The model reconciles the conflicting insights of dynamic systems models of human population change, and we conduct a preliminary test of this model’s implications in Central Texas by developing time-series that estimate changes in human population density, modeled ecosystem productivity, human diet, and labor over the last 12,500 years. Our analysis indicates that Texas hunter-gatherers experienced three long-term population growth overshoots and recessions into quasi equilibria. Evidence indicates that each of these overshoots and recessions associate with changes in diet and labor devoted to processing high density, lower quality resources to unlock calories and nutrients. Over the long-term, population recessions may be necessary for populations to experiment with social and physical infrastructure changes that raise the carrying capacity of their environment.
The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2019
Despite years of debate, the factors that control the long-term carrying capacity of human popula... more Despite years of debate, the factors that control the long-term carrying capacity of human populations are not well understood. In this paper, we assess the effect of changes in resource extraction and climate driven changes in ecosystem productivity on the carrying capacity of hunter-gatherer populations in a terrestrial and coastal ecosystem. To make this assessment, we build time-series estimates of changes in resource extraction via human stable isotopes and ecosystem productivity via paleoclimate models and geomorphic records of flood events. These estimates of resource extraction and ecosystem productivity allow us to assess a complex model of population expansion that proposes linked changes between population density, resource extraction, and intensification. We find that changes in resource extraction had a larger effect on carrying capacity in both the terrestrial and coastal ecosystems than climate drivers of ecosystem productivity. Our results are consistent with the idea that both Malthusian limits on resources and Boserupian pressures to reorganize economic systems operate in hunter-gatherer populations over the long-term. Our data and analysis contribute to evaluating complex models of population growth and subsistence change across archaeological cases.
PLOS ONE, Jul 11, 2019
Taking inspiration from the archaeology of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), we develop an ecologica... more Taking inspiration from the archaeology of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), we develop an ecological theory of population distribution among mobile hunter-gatherers. This theory proposes that, due to the heterogeneity of resources in space and time, foragers create networks of habitats that they access through residential cycling and shared knowledge. The degree of cycling that individuals exhibit in creating networks of habitats, encoded through social relationships, depends on the relative scarcity of resources and fluctuations in those resources. Using a dynamic model of hunter-gatherer population distribution, we illustrate that increases in population density, coupled with shocks to a biophysical or social system, creates a selective environment that favors habitat partitioning and investments in social mechanisms that control the residential cycling of foragers on a landscape. Our work adds a layer of realism to Ideal Distribution Models by adding a time allocation decision process in a variable environment and illustrates a general variance reduction, safe-operating space tradeoff among mobile human foragers that drives social change.
Quaternary International, Aug 1, 2017
The adaptive cycle, a seminal component of resilience theory, is a powerful model that archaeolog... more The adaptive cycle, a seminal component of resilience theory, is a powerful model that archaeologists use to understand the persistence and transformation of prehistoric societies. In this paper, we argue that resilience theory will have a more enduring explanatory role in archaeology if scholars can build on the initial insights of the adaptive cycle model and create more contextualized hypotheses of socialecological change. By contextualized hypotheses we mean testable hypotheses that specify: (1) the form of the connections among people and ecological elements and how those connections change; and (2) the resilience-vulnerability tradeoffs associated with changes in the networks and institutions that link social and ecological processes. To develop such a contextualized hypothesis, we combine our knowledge of the prehistory of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), mathematical modeling, and the concept of panarchy to study why human societies successfully cope with the interrelated forces of globalization, population growth, and climate change, and, sometimes, fail to cope with these interrelated forces. Our hypothesis is that, in response to population growth, hunter-gatherers on the TCP created increasingly dense social networks that allowed individuals to maintain residual access to important sources of food. While this was a good strategy for individuals to maintain a reliable supply of food in a variable environment, increasingly elaborate social networks created a panarchy of reachable forager-resource systems. The panarchy of forager-resource systems on the TCP created a hidden fragility: The potential for the failure of resources in one system to cascade from system-to-system across the entire TCP. We propose that this occurred around 700 years BP, causing a 6000 year old ritual and mortuary complex to reorganize.
Antiquity, Dec 1, 1995
A complement to a paper early in this year's volume of ANTIQUITY reports experience with sear... more A complement to a paper early in this year's volume of ANTIQUITY reports experience with searching for blood-residue traces with the services of a commercial testing laboratory.
Journal of Anthropological Research, Jul 1, 1988
This volume, a monograph in the New Studies in Archaeology Series, is a revised version of the au... more This volume, a monograph in the New Studies in Archaeology Series, is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation from the University of New Mexico completed in 1980. It is an attempt to develop a model of adaptive change and apply it to archaeological material ...
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
In February, March, and May of 2001, personnel from the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR),... more In February, March, and May of 2001, personnel from the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR), The University of Texas at San Antonio, conducted a cultural resource inventory survey, involving pedestrian survey and shovel testing, of an approximately 90-acre (364,060 m 2) tract of land in a plowed field on Camp Bowie, Brown County, Texas. A total of 104 shovel tests were systematically placed within the 90-acre area. The survey identified three prehistoric sites, all lithic scatters defined by surface material. Twelve additional shovel tests were placed on these three sites. An arrow point fragment, collected from the surface of 41BR499, suggests a Late Prehistoric affiliation for this site. Dart points collected from 41BR500 suggest a Late Archaic use of this area. Finally, an arrow point, collected from 41BR501, suggests a Late Prehistoric component at this site. In addition, a single whole mano was collected from the surface of 41BR500.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Sep 1, 2021
Abstract Describing and explaining the population growth trajectories of prehistoric hunter-gathe... more Abstract Describing and explaining the population growth trajectories of prehistoric hunter-gatherers is an important research problem. Large radiocarbon data sets provide one empirical starting point for describing these trajectories; however, explaining trajectories of growth must always take place within the context of theory. In this paper, we formalize a ratchet model of long-term, mean population growth among hunter-gatherers and evaluate the plausibility of that model using two extensive radiocarbon data sets from Central Texas and the Texas Coastal Plain. Our analysis suggests that hunter-gatherer populations in these regions displayed waves of population growth separated by periods of population saturation and competition for resources. Our model and results suggest that hunter-gatherer populations in Texas may have experienced multiple demographic transitions to successively higher levels of population saturation (carrying capacity). Our results derive from a general model, a set of methods applicable across archaeological regions, and provide a basis for hypotheses that may explain changes in the socioecology of hunter-gatherers.
Index of Texas archaeology, 2001
The survey was conducted in conjunction with repair of existing seepage at Twin Buttes Dam. The r... more The survey was conducted in conjunction with repair of existing seepage at Twin Buttes Dam. The repair, conducted under the Safety of Dams program, involved the construction of several borrow pits. Since the Safety of Dams repair required BOR to inventory several areas of the reservoir lands under Section 106 of the NHPA, it was decided to expand the Section 106 work, and do the entire Section 110 survey of the reservoir.
Shifts in leporid diets, as tracked by δ 13 C collagen values, reflect shifts in vegetation. Both... more Shifts in leporid diets, as tracked by δ 13 C collagen values, reflect shifts in vegetation. Both species showed similar patterns, with a dramatic change reflecting increased C 3 plants between 775BP and the present. While this shift may have been accelerated by historic land use changes, the collagen values suggest that this change was initiated much earlier. This suggests a climate component may also be involved. The prehistoric sequence also shows increased sample variability over time, possibly indicating higher year to year variability in vegetation and associated climate variables.
