Before I get to the article of the day, I thought I would give a brief overview of what USpace is. It’s a digital collection of scholarly materials produced at The University of Utah. Our goal is to collect and archive these materials–the U’s “intellectual capital”–and make them freely available on the Internet.
One of our USpace collections, UScholar Works, showcases the work of our faculty and researchers. We approach faculty at the U and request their permission to archive their articles. Sometimes we aren’t able to archive all of a faculty member’s works in UScholar Works because we can’t get permission from some publishers, but we persevere.
Really, you could call us hunter-gatherers. We hunt through faculty vitas and websites in search of articles. We use UScholar Works as a place to gather those materials and share them with the world. Anyone, anywhere, can visit the site and search any subject or phrase, say, “hunter-gatherers,” and find some of what U faculty has produced on that subject.
So, that brings me to the article of the day, by Dr. Kristen Hawkes, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology: Why Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of the Problem of Public Goods. Drawing on her fieldwork with the Ache of eastern Paraguay and Hadza of northern Tanzania, Dr. Hawkes offers an alternative hypothesis on differential resource sharing of hunter-gatherers, looking at the issue of why hunter-gatherers share some categories of foods more widely than others. Are you curious to know some more? Check it out in USpace.