Charles Hilton

Enhancing our understanding of the skeletal biology of modern hunter-gatherers and developing more sophisticated models of fossil and prehistoric hominin locomotor behavior and subsistence activities requires information on male and female forager mobility patterns. Unlike other primates, modern human foragers expend considerable energy in activities involving the transport of resources across the landscape. Although male foragers are often associated with high mobility in comparison to their female counterparts, female foragers are seen to engage in subsistence tasks incorporating a high frequency of burden carrying. This paper examines the influence of age and sex on mobility and resource transport in a group of Pume foragers located in the savanna-wetlands of southwestern Venezuela.

... Young women also appear to participate in fewer long‐distance dry‐season foraging trips (Hilton and Greaves 2004 ... of weaned offspring and other dependents is positively and strongly correlated with greater work effort by mothers (Hurtado, Hawkes, and Kaplan 1985; Hurtado ...

Recently, strong pleas have emerged to place the health of adolescents on the global health agenda. To reposition adolescence front and center, scholars argue that we must work toward a richly contextualized approach that considers the role that social environments play in shaping the final stages of growth and development. We aim to contribute to this deeper understanding of the social determinants of global adolescent health by offering a case study of three nomadic pastoralist communities from northern Kenya. In addition to noteworthy political and economic marginalization, East African pastoralist communities also contend with chronic, low intensity intercommunity conflict. Data collected over five extensive visits from 2008 to 2011, include the 10-19 year olds from 215 randomly sampled Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana households. Using a case/control design, we sampled two sites per ethnic community: one directly affected and one less affected by intercommunity violence. Our nutriti...

ABSTRACT Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's ‘publics’. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a challenge. In this three-field (cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology) study, we aim to capture, in writing, a process of collaborative fieldwork with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains. In the process, we highlight the reciprocal knowledge production that this cross-subdisciplinary, transcultural fieldwork produced.« C’est le maendeleo qui les a enlevés » : dérangements funéraires et production de connaissances réciproque dans un contexte d’archéologie collaborativeRésuméDepuis quelques décennies, les approches de la recherche et de l’écriture dans les quatre domaines de l’anthropologie qui soulignent la nécessité de respecter d’autres modes de narration et de construction de l’histoire et d’interagir avec les « publics » se sont multipliés. Cette évolution a donné naissance à une recherche plus responsable du point de vue éthique et à des pratiques d’écriture plus inclusives. Il n’en reste pas moins que la mise en place même d’une collaboration interculturelle et la production de connaissances y afférentes reste difficile. Dans cette étude menée dans trois domaines (anthropologie culturelle, biologique et archéologique), nous voulons restituer, par l’écriture, un processus de travail de terrain collaboratif avec des pasteurs Samburu dans le nord du Kenya, qui intégrait à titre expérimental un auto-examen ethnographique et des fouilles bio-archéologiques impliquant des restes humains. Dans ce contexte, nous mettons en lumière la production réciproque de savoir que ce travail de terrain inter-subdisciplinaire et interculturel a suscitée.

We examine cultural understandings and practices surrounding suicide in Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana pastoralists in north-central Kenya-three geographically overlapping and mutually interacting pastoralist communities. We collected our data in the context of a study of poverty, violence, and distress. In all three communities, stigma associated with suicide circumscribed individual responses to the World Health Organization's Self-Report Questionnaire, which led to an ethnographic sub-study of suicide building upon our long-standing research in East Africa on distress, violence, and death. As is true for most of sub-Saharan Africa, reliable statistical data are non-existent for these communities. Thus, we deliberately avoid making assertions about generalizable statistical trends. Rather, we take the position that ethnographically nuanced studies like the one we offer here provide a necessary basis for the respectful collection of accurate quantitative data on this important and troubling practice. Moreover, our central point in this paper is that positive transformational work relating to suicide is most likely when researcher outsiders practice 'deep engagement' while respectfully restricting their role to (1) iterative, community-driven approaches that contextualize suicide; and (2) sharing contextualized analyses with other practitioners. We contend that situating suicide within a broader cultural framework that includes attitudes and practices surrounding other forms of death is essential to both aspects of anthropological-outsiders' role.

Functional-morphological analyses related to fossil and contemporary hominin locomotion are the focus of this volume. As locomotion is considered a key element in the overall behavior of living primates, allowing them to fulfill such basic needs as avoiding predators, foraging for food, and finding mates, biological anthropologists have generally agreed that it most likely served similar functions in earlier hominins as well. In primates, differing locomotor behaviors and their impact on other biological complexes have produced a diverse range of behavioral and anatomical configurations. In turn, primate locomotion studies are diverse in their scope. Anthropologists interested in hominin locomotion frequently draw on primate and other animal locomotor studies in efforts to understand the complexities associated with the evolution of hominin locomotion. Through comparative analyses on musculo-skeletal structures, positional behavior, and the kinematic and kinetic components of body motion in settings ranging from dissection rooms, laboratories, and in the field, researchers have developed a wide variety of approaches and techniques for investigating the intricacies of locomotor movement in living contemporary hominins and their closest relatives.

... Figure 1. Location of Nakeidi cairnfield, Maralal, Samburu District, Kenya. ... were quick to point to heritage claims in association with the cairns, and this aspect of their participation in, and response to, the project revealed a dynamic proc-ess of memorialisation and meaning ...

Neandertal proximal pedal phalanges have been described as short relative to foot length with relatively wide diaphyses, the latter purportedly to resist elevated levels of mediolateral loading during locomotion. Analysis of proximal pedal phalanges from samples of Neandertals, ...