Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Trail archaeology draws upon both remote sensing technologies and ethnographic records to map indigenous trail networks, revealing important insights about trade, migration, and communication between indigenous societies.
Despite their unmistakable significance in regional histories and unique roles in cultural transmission and traditions, Indigenous trail systems are frequently ignored in non-Indigenous heritage resource management regimes. These regulatory regimes often require that heritage have discrete spatial and temporal boundaries and predefined material attributes and functions. However, as landscape-scale connectors of peoples, places, and times that blend spiritual, economic, and educational functions, trails challenge these proscriptions. Trails eschew cost-effective identification, documentation, and conservation. Accordingly, and because trails cannot be adequately documented without the expertise of people whose lands and communities they serve, archaeologists tasked with identifying heritage in advance of resource extraction and land alteration projects often omit trails from assessments. Shortcomings in heritage conservation regimes in British Columbia and elsewhere are resulting in the obliteration of Indigenous trails at precisely the time they are needed to support the revitalization of Territory-Community relationships at the core of Indigeneity. We address this tragedy by integrating archaeology, ethnography, remote sensing, and collaborative fieldwork to document trails in Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan Territories. This enables protection in heritage management contexts and renewed and expanded trail use in intergenerational and intercultural contexts in support of Indigenous community futurity, survivance, and shared senses of community, geography, and stewardship.
Although the use of the word “average” emerged in the early 1500s in the context of sharing the costs of shipping damages, widespread use of the formula for computing the arithmetic mean did not emerge until the 18th century, as long division became more broadly taught.
Averages became a distinctive form of information in early modern European culture, first in commercial arithmetic, then in natural philosophy, demography, political economy, and eventually in eclectic social analysis. Averaging, in the modern sense of calculating an arithmetic mean by adding up the individual values of cases in a set and then dividing that total by the number of cases, provided an empirical and heuristic resource for understanding planetary orbits, fertility and mortality rates, experimental results in natural philosophy, fiscal resources, the return on stock market investments, the relative profitability of crops, incomes and the cost of living, and even the trivia of daily life. Averaging created a new class of fact—precisely typifying information that varied. By the Enlightenment, averages had become a respectable, readily deployed, form of fact, giving unity to the variety of experience and knowledge. Averages became a metaphor of credibility and normality.