Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (2,472 Records)
This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archeology education initiatives can benefit from 3D technologies to develop further engagement between archeological artifacts and the public. In the summer of 2018, the National Park Service in collaboration with the National Council of Preservation Education crafted a project to help NPS write guidelines for parks...
Artifactual Composition of Terminal Deposits from the Classic Maya site of Baking Pot, Belize. (2017)
Throughout the Maya Lowlands, archaeologists have identified Terminal Classic deposits associated with the final activities in ceremonial spaces. These features include concentrations of cultural material deposited in the corners of plazas and courtyards. At the site of Baking Pot, Belize, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconaissance (BVAR) project has identified several of these terminal deposits. This presentation will shed light on the types of artifacts being deposited during these final...
Artificial Lines in Saltwater and Sand: Boundaries, Borders, and Beaches in Oceania and Australia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have long appeared to Western eyes as naturally bounded entities. It has been proposed that they represent ‘natural laboratories’ for understanding natural and cultural evolution. At the same time, islands are recognised as contact zones, for example historian Greg Dening has outlined the significance of...
Artisan production and morphological changes in skeletons from San Jose de Moro (North coast of Peru) (2017)
The study of occupational stress markers was an attractive investigation field some years ago, due to the alleged possibility for the identification of ancient activities through skeletal changes. Nevertheless, a critical vision of the issue evidences that this relation is not so easy to establish, because bone biology is complex and also because different activities may produce similar changes. This does not mean that this type of studies should be abandoned. On the contrary, it is a call for...
Arts and Sciences of Ancient Plants at McMaster University (2017)
Since 2013, the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF) has explored questions surrounding the relationship between humans and plants, including plant cultivation and collection, consumption and social uses of flora, and interactions between people and landscape. Active projects address human-plant dynamics throughout different regions of Mesoamerica, South America, and Ontario, at time periods ranging from the Late Pleistocene through historic periods. With recent support from...
Ascendancy through Ancestry: Evidence of Late Classic Sociopolitical Change at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2017)
The ceremonial architecture of Pacbitun’s epicentral plaza was recently discovered to have underwent a drastic early Late Classic (AD 550 – 700) transformation. The assemblage, originally designated as a Southern Lowland architectural archetype known as an E Group complex, was uniquely modified physically and adopted an intensive mortuary practice that seemingly altered the group’s function. The inclusion of several Late Classic elite interments suggests that Pacbitun’s ceremonial assemblage had...
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust : the role of wood in ancient maya funerary sequences (2017)
From 2014 to 2016, the intensive excavation of the residential unit 5N6 in Naachtun (Guatemala) has yielded 13 burials intricately linked with the evolution of the architecture. Put together, these funerary contexts allow for a fine-scale reconstruction of the local dynamics and everyday life in the unit. However, funerary archaeologists often fail to consider the burial itself as a micro-context, a combination of significant gestures and actions that can be analyzed using the same principles as...
Assessing Agricultural Intensification in Greater Chiriquí during the Aguas Buenas Period (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aguas Buenas (roughly 300 BC–AD 900) was a period characterized by the growth of small villages and the development of identifiable settlement hierarchies in certain areas. This paper applies a variant of the site catchment analysis originally articulated by Steponaitis (1981) to evaluate the relationship between...
Assessing Defensibility: Geospatial Analyses of Preclassic to Colonial Highland Maya Settlement Patterns (2017)
Postclassic Maya settlement patterns have long been explained in terms of the increasing defensibility in the transition from Classic period settlement patterns. Drawing on arguments for the increased militancy and conflict that characterized the Maya region in the wake of the Classic "collapse", this narrative has endured despite minimal cross-context, large scale assessment. This paper presents the results of a large-scale, in-progress diachronic geospatial analysis of Maya settlement...
Assessing Destruction Risk of Cultural Resources: Primary and Secondary Impacts of Climate Change on the Archaeological Record (2018)
Coastal archaeological and historic sites increasingly face primary impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, flooding, and erosion. As cultural sites are subjected to destructive processes, action is generally limited to mitigation and salvage of immediately threatened significant sites, while their destruction by the resettlement of affected communities has been given little attention. This secondary impact of climate change threatens sites outside of the immediate zone of flooding...
Assessing Human-Animal Interactions in Mesoamerica: Ancient Maya Use of the Black-Throated Bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis) (2017)
This paper examines human-animal interaction between the ancient Maya and the black-throated bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis), a small quail resident to Central America. We provide a literature review of the occurrence of bobwhite remains in Maya faunal assemblages. Unpublished faunal analyses by the primary author, in conjunction with the published literature, suggest that the bobwhite, like many animals in Mesoamerica, was of greater importance to the Maya than as a mere dietary food. We...
Assessing hunter-gatherer mobility in Australia's Western Desert using historic aerial imagery from the 1950s (2017)
Access to water, food, and other resources is a critical factor structuring hunter-gatherer mobility, but few landscape-level studies have examined how resource availability influences where foragers go and how long they remain at one place before moving on. Using a newly available set of aerial images from the Western Desert of Australia taken in 1953, we utilize a simple ideal-free distribution model to reconstruct forager mobility by the fire footprints they leave behind. We examine three...
Assessing Knowledge of Native American Tribes and Their Heritage: An interactive Poster (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of American archaeology, and the knowledge it produces, have impacts on the social, economic, and political policies and laws which affect Native American Tribes and Native American community members. Non-Native cultural heritage and resource managers, academic researchers, and museum staff who work with Tribal heritage often lack basic knowledge...
Assessing prehistoric herding strategies through stable isotope analysis: a case study from the Dry Puna of Argentina (2017)
The relationship between human groups and animal populations in the past can be studied through stable isotope analysis of zooarchaeological remains. More specifically, the isotopic analysis of domestic animals’ tissues can help us to investigate herd composition, diet and mobility strategies employed by herders in the past. However, before these methods can be applied to resolve such questions, variation in isotopic composition and its causes must be addressed and explored by a modern reference...
Assessing Stable Isotope Data from Archaeological White-tailed Deer Remains as a Palaeoenvironmental Proxy at the Site of La Joyanca, Northwestern Peten, Yucatan Peninsula (2017)
The sociopolitical reorganization of the Maya that took place during the Terminal Classic (AD 850–1050) has been interpreted as being correlated to regional environmental change, specifically drought. However, few climate reconstructions come from the southern Maya lowlands where the decline occurred during this period. While most paleoenvironmental reconstructions lack a local, site-related signature and instead reflect regional trends, stable isotope analyses of herbivore faunal remains have...
Assessing the Chronological Variation Within the Western Stemmed Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points exhibit considerable morphological variability, which may reflect difference in function, ethnolinguistic affiliation, resharpening/rejuvenation, or age. These ideas represent hypotheses that remain to be tested, and rejecting one or more of them will...
Assessing the Population History of the Atacama Desert using 3D Geometric Morphometric Methods (2017)
Many scholarly debates in South American archaeology have centered on the discovery and cranial morphology of the earliest inhabitants known as Paleoamericans that predate 8,000 years BP. Although it was initially hypothesized that cranial differences between Paleoamericans and later populations may reflect distinct biological populations or migration patterns that occurred after the initial colonization of South America, recent genetic data show biological continuity throughout the Holocene in...
Assessing the Taphonomic Alterations of 29 Human Anatomical Specimens Confiscated in Louisiana (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anatomical specimens used for teaching frequently become available for sale online. In one Louisiana case, authorities confiscated 29 human anatomical specimens. These specimens are used to highlight the breadth of information that can be gathered from such isolated human remains. Anatomical specimens are easily identified by the techniques used to prepare...
Assessing Threats to Coastal Sites: A Trial Run on St Croix, USVI (2018)
The International Association for Caribbean Archaeology's Endangered Sites Task Force is concerned about the threat to coastal sites by rising sea levels. In March 2017, a small team of Mercer University non-archaeology students participated in a project on ST Croix, USVI, to determine how local populations could best provide measurable information to professional archaeologists and cultural resource managers. The five-day project assessed ten sites assigned by the USVI Territorial...
At the Intersection: Destabilizing White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Century Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
Guided by contemporary humoral theory, 18th-century Europeans believed climate and bodily humors to be mutually influential and correlated in their effect on human temperament, appearance, and behavior. Resettlement to a new climate was understood to create humoral imbalances fundamentally affecting an individual’s character and even physical appearance including skin color. Subject to the effects of tropical climate British settlers to the West Indies thus transformed were viewed as...
Attaining Goals Together: Collaborative Heritage Resource Stewardship and the Forest Service (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me: What Have We Learned Over the Past 40 Years and How Do We Address Future Challenges" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Passage of federal environmental laws during the 1960’s forced otherwise autonomous bureaucracies to accept professions into their ranks that previously had no place. Public lands agencies like the Forest Service were required to employ archaeologists once the National Historic...
Attempt of Modelization of the First Settlements in America at Pleistocene Based on the New Archaeological Sequences in Piaui (Brazil) (2017)
The research our teams are conducting in the parc of Capivara in Brazil since 2008 lead to reveal 6 new Pleistocene archaeological sequences . The sites are all located within a 20 km area and stem from different sedimentary and topographic environments including: open air, rock shelter, cave at the bottom of cuesta or in karst. Each of the sites shows different sedimentary sequences, including different archeological horizons and different typo-technical compositions. The dating that we have...
Attractive Salt: What the magnetic susceptibility and stratigraphy of the Witz Naab and Killer Bee mounds reveal about ancient Maya salt production and economy. (2017)
Witz Naab and Killer Bee contain some of the last remaining above-ground mounds of a once-thriving salt industry in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a large salt-water system in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Documented sea-level rise during the Terminal Classic has submerged the once thriving Classic period (A.D. 300-900) Maya salt works. Excavations and magnetic susceptibility were conducted as part of the author’s dissertation research at Louisiana State University (LSU). This excavation is part of...
Authentication of Museum-Curated Tsantsas Utilizing Next Generation Sequencing Technology (2017)
The Shuar, native to Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador, prepared shrunken heads to serve as trophies following battle, in response to their cultural beliefs. Authentic shrunken heads (tsantsas) were prepared in a precise manner and exhibit key morphological characteristics. Forgeries, including primates and inauthentic human preparations, were marketed to tourists and private collectors to profit from the "savage" image surrounding the Shuar. Inauthentic shrunken heads were prepared in a...
The Authentication of the Codex Maya of Mexico, Previously Known as the Grolier, through Scientific Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After 45 years of polemic about the Codex Grolier, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico finally decided to undertake major scientific studies on this document to evaluate its authenticity. During...