School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts

This atlas presents a comprehensive cartographic reconstruction of the historical geography of Kham (Eastern Tibet) around 1950, immediately prior to the major political, social, and institutional transformations that followed the incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China. Drawing upon a geospatial database of more than 1,500 Buddhist monasteries, temples, hermitages, and Bonpo religious establishments, the atlas maps the distribution of religious institutions, sectarian affiliations, language regions, trade routes, monastic urban systems, and regional interaction networks across eastern Tibet. The atlas accompanies a broader research project examining the role of monasteries as the principal urban, economic, and organizational institutions of Tibetan society. Using historical GIS methods, terrain-adjusted spatial modeling, and reconstructed monastic population estimates, it visualizes the regional systems and sub-systems that structured social, economic, and religious life across Kham. The maps presented here illustrate patterns of monastic aggregation, core-periphery organization, long-distance exchange, and regional integration that are often difficult to perceive through textual sources or local case studies alone. Designed as an open-access scholarly resource, the atlas serves as a cartographic companion to the Tibetan Monastic Ritual Economy Model Database. It provides researchers, students, and the general public with a systematic visual framework for exploring the religious landscapes, regional systems, and historical development of eastern Tibet.

This research investigates the influence of seabird guano on agriculture in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru through multi-isotopic, archaeological, and historical data. We conduct stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur analyses of 35 late pre-Hispanic maize (Zea mays) cobs and 11 seabirds from archaeological contexts spanning the late Formative period (c. 200 BCE - 150 CE) to the Colonial period (1532-1825 CE). We report the strongest evidence yet for pre-Inca use of marine fertilizers in Chincha. Isotopic and radiocarbon data corroborate colonial-era records and regional avifauna iconography and assemblages, indicating that Indigenous communities fertilized maize with guano by at least 1250 CE. Maize δ15N values are consistent with archaeological studies on guano manuring in Chile, expanding the known geographical extent of this agricultural practice. Maize δ34S values overlap with experimental field data but are not enriched in 34S, possibly reflecting various environmental and cultural variables. We suggest that seabird guano fertilization played an important role in the sociopolitical and economic expansion of the Chincha Kingdom, and its eventual relationship with the Inca Empire. Our findings carry significant implications for the broader Andes, nuancing understandings of agricultural production in coastal environments while drawing attention to marine fertilizers as a potentially widespread driving force of social change among pre-Hispanic societies.

Este artículo traza algunas ideas fundamentales que pueden orientar la forma de enfocar la memoria colectiva o social de la guerra civil de El Salvador y su conexión con la experiencia y la identidad nacional. Considera los temas de las memorias de grupo, las memorias como discurso, la memoria nacional, la historia versus la memoria, y el papel del silencio y el olvido. Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 153, 2019: 9-21

Yuca (Manihot esculenta esculenta; cassava, manioc) is a native Amazonian crop represented by myriad landraces. To investigate human influences on its diversification, we conducted field observations and analyzed 13 short tandem repeat (STR) loci in 43 landraces in the Peruvian Amazon. We found a different multilocus genotype (MLG) in every landrace. However, tests for Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium found a deficit of heterozygosity at every locus (p < 0.001 for 12 of 13 loci). Further, the fraction of genetic variance due to landrace differences was greater than expected (38.84%; p = 0.001). This suggested that landrace hybridization is restricted, a finding consistent with our field observations. However, we found an excess of within-landrace heterozygosity (p < 0.001) in 39 of 43 landraces, suggesting they originated through hybridization. Mantel tests identified associations between genetic and geographic distances (p < 0.001), but their correlation coefficients were low (Mantel’s r < 0.21). In addition, AMOVA analyses revealed that differences between landraces collected from five sampled rivers accounted for just 3.05% of observed genetic variance (p < 0.001). Neighbor joining and principal components analyses also revealed little evidence of differentiation between rivers. Finally, in a comparison with a secondary sample, we found that the closest relative of 27 of 28 specimens had a landrace name different from their own, suggesting that traditional nomenclature is a poor indicator of genetic relatedness.

Maps only from "A Historical Atlas of Tibet". I retained the publishing rights to the maps I made for my historical atlas of Tibet, and here I am making them freely available to all.