A place named Sonora appears in seventeenth and eighteenth century documents and on later maps. Two sources place this site north of the present-day town of Huepac. Other sources place the site south of Huepac. All of these sources place it on the east side of the Rio Sonora, but use various designations. This paper analyzes documentary, cartographic, and geographic evidence and concludes that there were actually two places named Sonora. One was a relatively late Spanish mining settlement south of Huepac, but on the west side of the river, and known today as San Felipe de Jesus. The other place named Sonora was an ancient Opata settlement called Sonota located at a spring on the east side of the Rio Sonora north of Huepac. Correcting misunderstandings, mispronunciations, misspellings, and differences in Spaniards' native language fluency over a century point to the river, valley, and state being named after this early site.

Obsidian provenance data plays a central role in reconstructions of patterns of interaction and trade in the North American Southwest. Unfortunately, there has been much less investment in obsidian provenance studies in the southern portion of this region, pertaining to Northwest Mexico, with the Sierra Madre Occidental and coastal regions of Sonora being acutely understudied. This study presents data on 338 specimens recovered in the former and offers a first glimpse of patterns from the late-precolonial era to historic period. We also report a characterization of one newly discovered source in this region, El Color & iacute;n de Jecota. Interpretations remain hampered by a significant number of "unknowns". Patterns of obsidian transport contribute substantially to present interpretations that trade relationships were highly balkanized with communities evidencing variable levels of source diversity and procurement strategies that do not uniformly reflect a prioritization of spatial propinquity.

Obsidian provenance data plays a central role in reconstructions of patterns of interaction and trade in the North American Southwest. Unfortunately, there has been much less investment in obsidian provenance studies in the southern portion of this region, pertaining to Northwest Mexico, with the Sierra Madre Occidental and coastal regions of Sonora being acutely understudied. This study presents data on 338 specimens recovered in the former and offers a first glimpse of patterns from the late-precolonial era to historic period. We also report a characterization of one newly discovered source in this region, El Colorín de Jecota. Interpretations remain hampered by a significant number of “unknowns”. Patterns of obsidian transport contribute substantially to present interpretations that trade relationships were highly balkanized with communities evidencing variable levels of source diversity and procurement strategies that do not uniformly reflect a prioritization of spatial propinquity.

The online pivot has opened many people’s eyes to new possibilities and challenges in the postpandemic world. This article describes what five geographers in three different countries learned from the experiment and assesses how the lessons can be carried forward. One of the big surprises for some of us was the extent to which students were open to different ways of learning during the 2020–2021 academic year. It is clear that some students wish to continue their programs either partially or completely online, although it is also clear that students continue to enjoy field work. The online pivot also showed us that assessment needs to be reexamined, student stress levels need to be lowered, and inequities among students need to be addressed. There are challenges associated with online education across international borders. From a faculty perspective, we have found that nobody needs to be isolated from research opportunities and collaboration, but there are also limits on what we can do. There are growing threats to academic freedom, and we need to move faculty away from precarious employment. Finally, some of us learned the importance of work–life balance.

"The Lakes of the Basin of Mexico: Dynamics of a Lacustrine System and the Evolution of a Civilization." The AAG Review of Books, 11(3), pp. 27–28

Recollections of Sonora, and Especially the Río Sonora Valley William E. Doolittle (bio) Introduction "You should write a memoir of the time you spent here," or something to this effect, said Bill Steen during our travels in the Río Sonora Valley, July 2021. My immediate thought was "Why would I do that?" But think about it I did, and soon thereafter started writing what I remembered. The text began chronologically but soon turned into a combination of Zuihitsu, or follow-the-brush type of poetry pioneered by Sei Shōnagon in the 11th century (Keene 1999), and a stream-of-consciousness type of prose much like that of the 14th-century Shintō priest Urabe (aka Yoshida) no Kaneyoshi, more commonly known as Kenkō (1998). Kenkō's "Notes from Leisure Hours," were written to alleviate boredom. They are thus "a work of timeless relevance...a splendid example of Japanese meditative style" (Keene in Kenkō 1998: xvii). Such works provide insight into the nature of aesthetics, evoking the author's appreciation of the world around her or him. Exposition of this worldly interest reflects not only the writer's personal preferences, but also the preferences of those who have the leisure time to think of aesthetic matters (Keene in Kenkō 1998: vii). And, so I write. My leisure time has been limited during the 44th and final year of teaching at the university level, 11 of which, including the past 4 years, as department chair. I have, however, taken a few moments now and again to jot down recollections of Sonora as they popped into mind. Often enough, I would send myself an email with a thought to be written down later. And, of course, many of these random thoughts required a [End Page 205] bit of editing of the surrounding text when I inserted them someplace other than at the end of the manuscript. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A map of Sonora with the locations of places mentioned in the text. Cartography by Peter H. Dana. Unlike the great, modern stream-of-consciousness writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, and Virginia Woolf, I include a map (Figure 1), and 95 pictures. As the old adage goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words." I shudder to think what this text [End Page 206] would be like without pictures; 90,000 more words, or three and a half times longer than it is, I guess. It certainly would not be as eloquent as the writing of the authors mentioned above, and indeed it is not, even with the pictures. All of the photographs, slides, and field notes I took while working in Sonora have been donated to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Hermosillo, Sonora. There was a time a few months into the writing process that I thought about reconsidering the format. I have travel diaries dating from 1977 to the present, and thought about restructuring the text into a chronological format. I decided against doing this, however, as the stream-of-consciousness approach was taking on a character of its very own. A history of my activities would be factual and boring. The following remarks comprise a very personal treatise, rather than a formal chronology of my experiences. My diaries will be available through the library system of the University of Texas at Austin after my death. The early ones are in both notebook and digital form; the later ones are solely digital. Until then.... My Sonoras My first recollection of the Río Sonora Valley is driving into it at dusk during the second week of June 1977. I was driving a 1968 GMC Suburban Carryall with my wife and two sons, Billy, age five, and David, three. We were part of a four-vehicle caravan including Dick Pailes (Figure 2) in his Suburban, Dan Reff (Figure 3) driving a University of Oklahoma pickup truck, and Adrianne Rankin driving her Chevy Blazer. All of our vehicles were packed with equipment, supplies, and people. Highway 15 from Nogales to the turnoff onto Highway 14, just north of Hermosillo, was an adventure unto itself. I won...

Richard Allen Pailes: In Memoriam William E. Doolittle (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 419] Those of us who have spent time with Dick (aka Rich) Pailes at Bahía de Kino, or Punta Chueca, Sonora, México, were privileged to experience a very special side of this man that was exhibited nowhere else. Being at the interface of two very different environments—the ocean and the desert—he exuded an aura of contentment that bordered on spiritual. Dick was, of course, happy in Norman, Oklahoma, with family, friends, colleagues, and students. And, he was happy while conducting field work. But on the Sonoran coast, he was special. He was in his proverbial element. He was in the two disparate worlds that he loved, one exclusively of water, the other devoid of it. Here, he wasn’t at home. He was home. Dick’s early home life was not easy. He was born 11 August 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, William Henry Pailes III, was a merchant seaman who was often away for extended periods, and his mother, Mildred Pedersen Pailes, died while he was young. As a result, he and his brother, William, lived in several boy’s homes. Life got easier when his father later married Joan Mattock and settled in Rhode Island, “The Ocean State.” There, he was joined by three more siblings, Jeanne, Pamela, and Arthur (AJ). Dick developed a life-long love of the sea in Rhode Island. He loved regaling friends about his experiences as a Marine on a ship patrolling the Mediterranean Sea in the 1950s, and his youthful money-making venture of digging quahogs. There are no quahogs at Kino Bay, but Dick did enjoy the local shrimp! He attended the University of Rhode Island, majored in journalism, and wrote a column of political opinion for the student newspaper as well as contributing to the Providence Westerly Sun. Following graduation in 1956, he attended the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and subsequently tried his hand at a number of trades in a variety of places. A fortuitous stop at a former professor’s home in Tempe, Arizona, sent him to his true calling, anthropology. Dick holds the distinction of being one of the first anthropology graduate students at Arizona State University. There, while serving as a graduate student supervisor on the excavation of an archaeological site, he met Roberta Lynne Rouse. They married in 1963, and throughout his life he credited Robbie, an Arizona native, for instilling in him a love of the desert. With a master’s degree in hand, he and his wife packed up their pickup truck and headed to Carbondale, Illinois where Dick studied under the tutelage of archaeologists J. Charles Kelly, and Walter W. Taylor, geographer Campbell W. Pennington, and ethnohistorian Carroll L. [End Page 420] Riley. Among his cohort were life-long friends Phil C. Weigand and Joseph B. Mountjoy. Some humorous anecdotes about a summer trip to Zacatecas, México, with Walt Taylor and others can be found in Mountjoy (2018), including one that crushed any hopes of Dick getting a dissertation out of sites excavated and artifacts collected in the Sierras. Instead, Taylor who had a house in Alamos, Sonora, convinced him to focus his research on the archaeology of southern Sonora and contacts between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (Pailes 1973). He completed his doctorate and accepted a position at the University of Oklahoma where he spent his 30-year academic career. At OU, Dick mastered the art of teaching formal and informal classes for undergraduates. His graduate seminars were always stimulating, and those from 7 to 10 pm often reconvened at a local watering hole until nearly closing time. Personally, these extended seminars are some of my fondest memories of graduate school. Myself and others learned a great deal in those seminars, including Dick’s approach to archaeology that can be best summarized as read, read, read. He was always concerned that his students, and later his son, track down seemingly obscure source materials and was adamant that archaeologists should read ALL the ethnographies for a region, all the ORIGINAL site report materials...

Universities and colleges worldwide have quickly moved campus-based classes to virtual spaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores the impact of this sudden transition of learning and teaching based on experiences and evidence from six institutions across three countries. Our findings suggest that although online and remote learning was a satisfactory experience for some students, various inequities were involved. Many students lacked appropriate devices for practical work and encountered difficulties in securing suitable housing and workspace. Students were stressed, and faculty were, too, especially those in precarious employment. The lack of fieldwork and access to laboratories created special challenges. We are concerned that the lack of hands-on experience could cause a decline in enrollments and the number of majors in geography over the next few years. This issue must be addressed by making introductory courses as engaging as possible. It is too early to determine the extent to which online and remote learning can replace campus-based, face-to-face geography education once the pandemic ends, but the new academic year of 2020–2021 will be revealing. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed preexisting problems and inequalities that will need our collective effort to address, regardless of the pandemic’s trajectory.

The landscape of Mallorca, Spain is characterized by a number of features constructed of rock. Windmills and walls are ubiquitous and visually striking. Equally widespread, but not as conspicuous, are other features associated with canal irrigation. One such feature that is understudied and therefore underappreciated is that of folk aqueduct bridges. This study investigates these features because they were critical in sustaining agriculture on the island for centuries, because they deserve recognition in order to be preserved as part of the island’s cultural and historical heritage, and because of their being antecedents or prototypes of similar structures built in Spanish colonial California. Two field seasons were devoted to locating and studying folk aqueduct bridges. Systematic windshield surveys were undertaken to identify such features. Once located, each folk aqueduct bridge was subjected to detailed description and analysis of size, shape, function, materials, and method of construction. Folk aqueduct bridges of Mallorca were built of shaped and unshaped stone, with channels made of ceramic tiles or ashlar tablets. Many of the rock walls once served as folk aqueduct bridges. Several California missionaries in the 18th century came from Mallorca, and the folk aqueduct bridges they built are based on those of their homeland.

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.

Many aqueducts built during the Spanish colonial era remain standing in México, albeit not functioning. A few date to the 16th century. Some of these early aqueducts are quite spectacular and highly visible. Others are small and are located in places not easily found. Despite their size, small aqueducts are important for understanding knowledge pertaining to technology transfers from the Old World to the New. One such aqueduct is on the property of the Hacienda de Pacho, near Xalapa in the state of Veracruz. One of its highly unusual characteristics is that its construction involved Gothic arches. No other colonial aqueduct in México has such features. According to documentary courses dating to AD 1591, it was built by the hacienda’s original owner who was from the Portuguese island of Madeira. This paper reports on field activities involved in verifying the Maderian origins of this unique aqueduct.

Language studies and earth science are typically viewed as very different subjects, as indeed they are, but they need not be envisaged as mutually exclusive. To wit, in this book Carlos Cordova melds his biogeographic and geoarchaeological expertise with his polyglot skills and insights to produce an environmental history like no other. Most environmental histories are crafted by historians who are masters at weaving beautiful—and all too frequently overly simplified, if not untrue—stories from often disjunct documentary sources, possessing minimal, if any, understanding of biophysical environments and earth surface and ecological processes. At best, these writers speak one language other than their own, and have only superficial knowledge of their subject region’s archaeology or prehistory. To state the case bluntly, environmental historians, wherever they work, will do themselves a huge favor by reading this book and following its methodological and conceptual leads.

Bulletin of Latin American ResearchVolume 36, Issue 4 p. 542-543 Book Review Los Primeros Mexicanos: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene People of Sonora - by Sánchez, Guadalupe William E. Doolittle, William E. Doolittle The University of Texas at AustinSearch for more papers by this author William E. Doolittle, William E. Doolittle The University of Texas at AustinSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 September 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12674Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume36, Issue4October 2017Pages 542-543 RelatedInformation

The insect midgut represents the primary site of action of the entompathogenic bacterium Brevibacillus laterosporus. While most studies on this microorganism focus on the identification and characterization of possible virulence factors and toxins, little is known about the insect immune defense mechanisms that are activated against this pathogen. In this study we have investigated the local immune response of different house fly stages to B. laterosporus at the transcriptional level, and we tested the hypothesis that an improvement in entomopathogenicity can be achieved by impairing host innate immunity. Gene expression analyses showed that immediately after spore ingestion (6–12 h) both larvae and adults increased the transcription rate of immune related genes in the midgut tissues, with special regard to those encoding for the main house fly antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) (i.e., attacin, cecropin, defensin, diptericin, domesticin, muscin) and for prophenoloxydase that is normally involved in the cascade of events leading to the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other factors with antibacterial properties. In experiments evaluating the use of an immunosuppressive agent to enhance the virulence of B. laterosporus against adult house flies, a significant downregulation of the same genes was observed 12–24 h after the administration of sub-lethal doses of the botanical compound azadirachtin. Consequently, a significant increase in B. laterosporus entomopathogenic action was observed when flies were preliminarily or simultaneously exposed to a sub-lethal dose of azadirachtin. These results provide an important contribution to the prospect of employing immune-impairing tools to implement pest management strategies.

As his students in geography, archaeology, geology, and Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern Studies attest, you could learn more in one day in the field with Karl Butzer than you could in a semester-long course with any other professor. Karl’s fieldwork and active teaching ended May 4, 2016. Future generations of students will learn from Karl by means of his 15 books and monographs, and more than 275 journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. Blending nuanced insights of human–environment relationships on the individual and societal levels with a keen understanding of earth-shaping process, Karl will be forever known as the founder of geoarchaeology and a contemporary champion of the concept of human adaptation to the environment. Reflected in his professional life, Karl’s personal life involved a difficult past, a rich present, and an optimistic eye toward the future.