The crossroads of archaeological investigation and indigenous oral tradition are ripe with potential for increased interaction between archaeologists and Native Americans. This interaction may become increasingly mandated in the future as NAGPRA affects excavations and material culture collections. Currently this body of information is not beingfully utilized. However, as examples of chronologi...

A procedure is described which is capable of detecting poetic organization within transcribed oral tradition text. It consists of two components: An automated process which generates recurring n-gram patterns, and a verification process of manual review. Applied to a corpus of Tahitian and Mangarevan oral tradition, it has led to discovery of a variety of uses of meter and parallelism; ranging ...

Survival of periodic subsistence crises is largely dependent on a group memory of past crisis situations and of the strategies appropriate for dealing with the altered environmental conditions. One mechanism utilized by nonliterate societies for the preservation of survival knowledge is its incorporation in oral tradition. As a body of reference knowledge, oral traditions potentially operate ov...